Author: Dr Barber

5. ‘The Crafty Cuttle’ – Early Doubts

cuttlefish-squareLong as the craftie Cuttle lieth sure
In the black Cloud of his thick vomiture;
Who list complain of wronged faith or fame
When he may shift it on to another’s name.

Joseph Hall

Authorship doubt began in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Orthodox scholars will tell you that there was no doubt about Shakespeare’s authorship until the 1850s, as the depressingly prosaic nature of the historical record connected to Shakespeare became apparent and fell short of the notion of the lone genius author developed by the Romantic poets.  Non-Stratfordians, however, will tell you that doubt began in the sixteenth century, connected to the very first publications to appear under the name ‘William Shakespeare’.

Venus and AdonisThe first of these was the long poem Venus and Adonis, registered anonymously in April 1593 and on the bookstalls by June.  Though there was no name on the title page, it contained an authorial dedication to the Earl of Southampton signed ‘William Shakespeare’.  Orthodox biographies will tell you that William Shakespeare was well established as an author by this time, but the historical record says otherwise.  As far as we can tell, the name was unknown to the general public before it appeared on Venus and Adonis.  Though we have evidence that Titus Andronicus and early versions of Henry VI Parts 2 and 3 had already been staged (they would be published the following year), and scholars believe a number of other canonical plays were already in existence, the audiences would have had less idea of the playwright’s name than we have of the screenwriter’s name when we go to see a movie (which we at least have a chance of noticing, since a movie has credits).  There is no evidence that the name William Shakespeare had appeared in any literary or theatrical context before it appeared on this dedication in 1593.

John Whitgift Archbishop of Canterbury Bishops Ban 1599Venus and Adonis was a sensation, and became the most widely printed work in Shakespeare’s lifetime.  It went through seventeen editions before 1641, and provoked much admiration from other writers.  The next year it was followed by a similar long poem, The Rape of Lucrece.  Doubts about these poems’ authorship were raised, according to non-Stratfordians, in Joseph Hall’s Vergidemiarum (1597-8) and John Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image (1598), both satires.  We are fortunate to possess copies of these texts, since within two years of their publication, they became the first two items listed in the Bishops’ Ban of 1599.   Nine books were specifically singled out for destruction. Scholars disagree about what properties these nine books have in common to cause official offence, but the first two listed share an interest in an author they call ‘Labeo’.

There is evidence that ‘Labeo’ was their name for the author of Venus and Adonis, and that Joseph Hall was the first person to publicly question Shakespeare’s authorship. So what is this evidence, and does it withstand scrutiny?

Read the first section, and continue through chapter by using the links at the bottom of each post. Sections are summarised below.

  • Who is the ‘Crafty Cuttle’?
    Marston and Hall appear to believe that Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were written under a pseudonym: Labeo.
  • Shakespeare’s But, O, and Hyphenated Adjectives
    Shakespeare’s first two poems use the hyphenated adjectives that Hall criticises, and also ‘big But Ohs’, assisting his identification as Labeo. But there’s more.
  • Shakespeare, Phoebus and Petrarch
    Shakespeare’s identification as Hall’s ‘Labeo’ is strengthened by his stealing from Petrarch in Rape of Lucrece, and appealing to Apollo in Venus and Adonis.
  • Shakespeare as Poggies Ghost
    Hall’s Labeo is referred to as a ‘bawdy Poggies ghost’. What does Hall mean by this, and how does it link to Shakespeare?
  • Lynceus the Boar-Hunter
    John Marston appears to refer to Joseph Hall as Lynceus, the mythical boar-hunter. How does this help us identify Hall and Marston’s target?
  • Bacon and Mediocria Firma
    When John Marston used the phrase ‘medocria firma’ – the Bacon family motto – was he suggesting that ‘Labeo’ was Francis Bacon?
  • The Original Labeo
    Why the nickname Labeo? A look at three possible derivations of Hall’s nickname for the author we know as Shakespeare.
  • The Case for Sixteenth Century Doubt of Shakespeare’s Authorship
    A summary of the argument that Marston and Hall doubted Shakespeare’s authorship. This powerful combination of evidential points has not been successfully refuted.

Click Here to Subscribe and we’ll notify you about new content.

Posted on by Dr Barber

Concealed Poets

On 24 March 1603, Queen Elizabeth I died.  Four days later, Francis Bacon, the lawyer and philosopher (not yet a knight) wrote to John Davies, the lawyer and poet (also not yet a knight), as the latter rode north to meet the new king, King James, who was riding south to take up the throne of England.  Bacon’s letter asks Davies to speak well of him to the king and court; to use his name well, and to defend it ‘if there be any biting or nibbling at it in that place’. He signs off with the sentence ‘So desiring you to be good to concealed poets’.  James Spedding, still the accepted authority on Sir Francis Bacon, said:

The allusion to ‘concealed poets’ I cannot explain. But as Bacon occasionally wrote letters and devices, which were to be fathered by Essex, he may have written verses for a similar purpose, and Davis may have been in on the secret.[1]

Those who believe that Bacon is the author of Shakespeare’s works have seized upon this reference as evidence for their man: by his own confession, Bacon was ‘a concealed poet’.   It’s true that he appears to be referring to a specific ‘concealed poet’ or ‘concealed poets’ (the referent may be singular or plural).   It’s true that the rest of the letter is entirely about ensuring that John Davies is good to him in the king’s company, and there is therefore a strong possibility that he is referring to himself.

But he may be alluding to another ‘concealed poet’ or ‘concealed poets’ of whom he has knowledge.  The very first authorship theory to be openly espoused, by Delia Bacon in 1857, was that Francis Bacon headed up a group of writers who collectively produced the works of Shakespeare as an entertaining humanist education for the still largely illiterate population, who were unlikely to read books, but would go to plays.  We note from a letter to his brother Anthony dated 15 January 1564 that Francis Bacon retained young men at Twickenham Park for copying out works of various kinds:

I have here an idle pen or two specially one that was cozened, thinking to have got some money this term. I pray you send me some­what else for them to write out beside your Irish collection which is almost done. There is a collection of Dr James [Dean of Christchurch] of foreign states largeliest of Flanders, which though it be no great matter, yet I would be glad to have it.

We know from the testimony of Shakespeare’s fellow share-holders, Heminges and Condell, that the manuscripts they received from him were unusually free of crossings out, which they took as an indication of his genius.  But any good writer knows that genius-level writing involves a great deal of crossing out. It is therefore most likely that what Heminges and Condell received were what we call ‘fair copies’; transcriptions of the kind of thing Francis Bacon’s ‘idle pens’ would have produced.  This is not, of course, proof that Bacon was in any way involved with producing the Shakespeare canon.

In his book The Shakespeare Claimants, H.N. Gibson says that

The term ‘concealed poet’ was in general use for all courtly writers who considered it infra dig to publish their work under their own names.  Bacon may well have been a concealed poet in this sense, and was sometimes an unconcealed one, for he published a rather inferior metrical version of the Psalms under his own name.  Sir John Davies was well-known as a patron of poets, and Bacon was obviously trying ‘to get on the right side of him’ by appealing to this soft spot in his nature.[2]

I have found no evidence to support Gibson’s claim that the term ‘concealed poet’ was in general use at court, or anywhere else.  A search of Early English Books Online for the phrase ‘concealed poet’ from 1473 to 1900 gives only two hits, both being instances of this letter (published in 1648 and 1657).  Gibson’s claim that ‘Sir John Davies was well-known as a patron of poets’ is also unsupported.  In 1603 he was a lawyer and poet himself, not a knight, or a gentleman of means.  His entry in the Dictionary of National Biography does not mention patronage of other writers and I have seen no evidence anywhere else that supports this claim.

So Bacon’s ‘concealed poets’ remains unexplained. Whether or not it has any connection to the Shakespeare canon, we do not know, but it is another piece of evidence against the orthodox contention that a hidden author is implausible.   It is clear that many authors concealed their identities and so far we have two pieces of testimony supporting the idea that some even engaged fronts.  However, we have not yet examined evidence that might suggest the author of Shakespeare’s works was among them.  We will begin this process in the next chapter.

CONTINUE>>>

[1] Spedding, The Works of Francis Bacon Vol X, p.65.

[2] H.N. Gibson, The Shakespeare Claimants (1962), p. 57.

Click Here to Subscribe and we’ll notify you about new content.

Posted on by Dr Barber

Shakespeare, the Queen, and Richard II

Actually engaging another person to stand in as the author is a step beyond the simple pseudonym, but Greene is not the only person whose testimony supports the idea that it occurred.  

THE QUEEN SUSPECTS A FRONT

On 11 July 1599, historian John Hayward was brought before the Star Chamber to answer questions regarding his treatise The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie IV, which he had dedicated to the Earl of Essex.  His book covered some of the same ground as Shakespeare’s Richard II (which had been published the previous year with his name on it): the deposition of a reigning monarch by an earl. According to a contemporary account, the Queen herself ‘argued that Hayward was pretending to be the author in order to shield ‘some more mischievous’ person, and that he should be racked so that he might disclose the truth’.[1]

In other words, the person then considered the highest authority in the land clearly believed that it was likely that someone might pretend to be the author of a work in order to shield someone else.  Given the punishments she was known to mete out to writers (including the one she was threatening here) her surmise was not unreasonable.  Of course one can argue that the punishments meted out to writers in the period were a very good reason why someone would not act as a front for someone else.  Hayward was thrown into prison and remained there until 1602.  But Robert Greene has knowledge of the practice and Elizabeth I suspects it; therefore it is safe to say that it occurred.

THE QUEEN AND SHAKESPEARE’S RICHARD II

2nd Earl of EssexThere is also a small peculiarity to note with respect to the 1599 trial and imprisonment of John Hayward.  He was prosecuted and subsequently imprisoned for writing about the Earl of Bolingbroke’s overthrow of the rightful king, Richard II, and for dedicating his book to the Earl of Essex, whom the queen was beginning to suspect intended to have her overthrown. A little over eighteen months later, in February 1601, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (Shakespeare’s company) were engaged by supporters of the Earl of Essex to perform Shakespeare’s Richard II on the eve of the Essex Rebellion.  Essex would be tried and executed for treason before the month was out. Days after the rebellion had been quashed, and Essex and his followers (including the Earl of Southampton) imprisoned, a representative of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men was called to give evidence. That representative was not Shakespeare, but Augustine Phillips.

He sayeth that on Friday last, or Thursday, Sir Charles Percy, Sir Jocelyn Percy, and the Lord Mounteagle, with some three more, spake to some of the players in the presence of this examinant to have the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard the Second to be played the Saturday next, promising to give them forty shillings more than their ordinary to play it. Where this examinant and his friends were determined to have played some other play holding that play of King Richard to be so old and so long out of use as that they should have small or no company at it But at their request this examinatant and his friends were content to play it the Saturday and had their 40 shillings more than the ordinary for it and so played it accordingly.

The prosecutor, Francis Bacon, was clear about the reason for this play being staged. Essex’s steward Sir Gilly Meyrick was ‘earnest to satisfy his eyes with the sight of that Tragedy which he thought soon his Lord should bring from the Stage to the State’.[2]

To non-Stratfordians, it seems peculiar that the author of this play, with its deposition scene, was neither questioned nor punished.  His name, after all, was on the version that had been published in 1598. Though the queen had clearly felt threatened, and even enraged, by the earlier retelling of the same story which had been linked to the Earl of Essex, and the writer of that text had been thrown into prison (was still imprisoned at this time), neither she nor her advisors punished William Shakespeare for writing a play that had been used to justify sedition and threaten her life. Nor did she seem to bear any ill-will toward his company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, for they performed for her and her Court on the eve of Essex’s execution, only 17 days after they had staged Richard II for his followers.

THE QUEEN’S CONVERSATION WITH LAMBARD

Yet in August of the same year, she made a statement to her archivist, William Lambard, which demonstrates very well her understanding of Shakespeare’s play and how it was used to undermine her.  The Queen had appointed Lambard in January 1600 as ‘the keeper of her records preserved in the Tower of London’.[3]  On August 4 1601, he presented her personally with a document know as the Pandecta: a catalogue of all those records covering a period of 286 years, from the reign King John to that of Richard III. Lambard subsequently recorded their conversation and the delighted manner with which she received the results of his labours, and in this document, headed That which passed from the excellent Maiestie of Queene Elizabeth in her privie chamber at Eastgreenwich 4 August 1601. 43 regni sui towardes William Lambard, the following exchange is recorded.

Her Maiesty fell upon the reigne of R.2. saying

I am R.2. know you not that.

W.L: ‘such a wicked imagination was determined, & attempted, by a most unkind gentleman, the most adorned creature that ever your Maiesty made.’

Her Majesty: ‘he that will forget God will also forget his benefactors, this tragedy was forty times played in open streets & houses.’[4]

Shakespeare Richard II 1598The reference to a tragedy ‘forty times played in open streets & houses’ must surely refer to Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard II. The authenticity of the Lambard conversation has been questioned, notably by Jonathan Bate, on the basis that the first record of it was printed only in 1780, and the original document has not survived.[5] But the words I have quoted above come from a far earlier transcript of the same conversation which has recently come to light, and this one has a very solid provenance.

This early transcript, whose discovery was reported by Jason Scott-Warren in 2012, was copied out in the hand of Lambard’s son-in-law, Thomas Godfrey, in 1627.[6] Godfrey had married the archivist’s only daughter, Margaret Lambard, on  5 May 1609 at the church (fittingly) of St Katherine by the Tower. His transcript of the same conversation, presumably from papers in the possession of Lambard’s daughter, suggests the archivist’s conversation with the Queen was genuine.

Bate’s other chief objection, that Elizabeth cannot have read the Pandecta’s sixty-four pages aloud, was also answered by Scott-Warren. He noted that it depends upon ‘his assumption that ‘she descended from’ can be taken to mean ‘she read aloud’ when the phrases used in Lambard’s conversation (‘Then she proceeded to further pages’, ‘Then she proceeded to the Rolls’, ‘Then she came to the whole total of all the membranes and parcels aforesaid’) speak ‘less of laborious reading aloud, more of skimming.’[7]

Queen Elizabeth I understood very well the link between Shakespeare’s Richard II and the potential threat to her life. Why she didn’t have the author of this play prosecuted in the same manner as the author of the non-fiction version of the same story is hard to fathom. She had argued that Hayward was pretending to be the author in order to shield ‘some more mischievous’ person’ and wanted him racked to discover the truth. But she made no comment upon Shakespeare.

CONTINUE>>>

[1] Steve Sohmer, ’12 June 1599: Opening Day at Shakespeare’s Globe’, Early Modern Literary Studies 3.1 (1997): 1.1-46.

[2] Quoted in Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age, 253.

[3] This is from an English translation of his Latin record of their meeting.

[4] These words are from the 1627 transcript.  They differ only very slightly from the version published in 1780 e.g. ‘played 40 times’ vs ’40 times played’.

[5] Jonathan Bate, ‘Was Shakespeare an Essex Man?’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 162 (2009), 1-28, idem, Soul of the Age, 249-86.

[6] Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Was Elizabeth I Richard II?: The Authenticity of Lambarde’s ‘Conversation’’, Review of English Studies (2013) 64 (264): 208-230, first published online July 14, 2012, doi:10.1093/res/hgs062.  The early transcript was recently discovered among the papers of Kent antiquarian Sir Edward Dering (1598-1644). Thomas Godfrey writes in a letter to Dering of their attempts to track down another copy of the Pandecta, which he believes was given by his late father-in-law to a friend Sir John Tindall, who had been murdered: ‘I have give you the best [light] of it that I can, & will not fail you in my best assistance to obtain it’.

[7] Jason Scott-Warren, ‘Was Elizabeth I Richard II?: The Authenticity of Lambarde’s ‘Conversation’’,re of skimming.” (Scott Warren, p.214)

Click Here to Subscribe and we’ll notify you about new content.

Posted on by Dr Barber

Defensive Anonymity

Due in no small part to the repressive nature of the era, we are in the dark as to the authorship of a large body of work in the early modern period. We have already seen that all playhouse plays (except George Peele’s) were published anonymously prior to 1594, and that anonymous publication of plays remained very common throughout Shakespeare’s lifetime.  These were works over whose publication writers often had no control. But the historical record reveals that even works over which writers had control were published with no author’s name attached, or with the author’s identity disguised.

Dido's Death 1622 AnonymousMany appeared in print under initials. Others works were published under obvious pseudonyms—Ignoto, Microcosmus—and sometimes less obvious ones, e.g. Andreas Philalethes.  This practice continued well into the reign of King James I.  As late as 1622, a publication called Dido’s Death bore the subtitle, ‘Translated out of the best of Latin poets into the best of vulgar languages. By one that hath no name.’  Printers and publishers, too, would often omit their names from title pages, or use only their initials.  To disguise one’s identity, either partially or entirely, was a common precaution when publishing anything.  Some writers clearly preferred not to have their names on their works.

CONTINUE>>>

Click Here to Subscribe and we’ll notify you about new content.

Posted on by Dr Barber

A Dangerous Age

Elizabethan censorship John Stubbs hand

The late 16th and early 17th century was a dangerous age in which to be a writer in England.  There was no such thing as freedom of speech.  Those who wrote works that upset others (particularly if those others were powerful, or had powerful friends) could easily find themselves in prison, and worse. A famous example is that of John Stubbs, who in 1579, when Shakespeare was just 15, published his opinions about the Queen’s proposed marriage to the Duke of Anjou and Alençon in a pamphlet entitled The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf. In this pamphlet he argued that the queen, at forty-six, was too old to have children, making the marriage pointless.  The Queen was incensed and John Stubbs was arrested, along with his publisher William Page and his printer Hugh Singleton.  On 13 October all three were found guilty and were sentenced to have their hands cut off. Hugh Singleton, being very elderly, had his sentence rescinded but both John Stubbs and William Page had their right hands cut off in the market place in Westminster on 3 November. It took three blows to sever Stubbs’s hand.

If this penalty was particularly severe, it was nevertheless a strong indication that writing was a dangerous business.  Despite peddling fictions, the writers of plays were not exempt.  Though Shakespeare’s era has long been depicted as a Golden Age of wit and manners, writers of that era were living under a repressive regime. Those in power were extremely conscious of the power of words to influence opinion and were paranoid about being criticised, mocked, or satirised. A number of the age’s most successful writers felt the sharp end of this particular stick.

Ben Jonson was arrested and imprisoned for a play he co-wrote with Thomas Nashe, The Isle of Dogs (1597). We have no idea why because all copies of the play have been destroyed. He was questioned by the Privy Council about his portrayal of political corruption in Sejanus (1603) and was imprisoned again, along with co-author George Chapman, for offending King James I with an anti-Scottish reference in Eastward Ho (1605).  The other author of Eastward Ho, John Marston, fled to escape imprisonment.  Ben Jonson reported later that they were threatened with having their noses and ears cut off.  Though in this case they were reprieved, physical punishments were a very real possibility.

Thomas Nashe prisonerSatirist Thomas Nashe was another popular and successful writer.  The only known portrait of him is a woodcut that shows him as a prisoner, with his legs chained together.  He was imprisoned for writing Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem, which offended the powers-that-be with a satirical portrait of London.  Presumably his time in prison was not something he wished to repeat; endangered as a co-author of the Isle of Dogs, he escaped to the country when Ben Jonson was arrested.  His house was raided in his absence and he remained away from London, effectively exiled in Norfolk.

The Bishops’ Ban

Two years later in 1599, his name featured prominently on The Bishops’ Ban. Issued jointly by the Archbishop of Canterbury (the chief censor of publications) and the Bishop of London, this was a list of books to be banned and brought to Stationer’s Hall to be burnt. In what has been described as ‘the most sweeping and stringent instance of early modern censorship’, a number of individual titles were named, chiefly satires, and all histories and plays not specifically licensed.  The final line of the ban targeted everything Thomas Nashe had written and would write in future:

That all NASHes books and Doctor HARVEYs books be taken wheresoever they may be found and that none of their bookes be ever printed hereafter.

The other person whose entire oeuvre was outlawed in the Bishops’ Ban was respected scholar Gabriel Harvey.  He, too, had been imprisoned for his writing.  In Three Letters, a published correspondence between him and the poet Edmund Spenser, he had referred unflatteringly to someone he referred to as Spenser’s ‘old controller’. The Controller of the Household, Sir James Croft, took this to be a reference to himself and had Harvey thrown in the Fleet Prison until Harvey managed to convince the Privy Council that he had, in fact, been referring to someone else (who was conveniently dead).

TORTURE IN BRIDEWELL

Thomas Kyd Spanish TragedyOne didn’t even have to publish a work to be at risk.  Playwright Thomas Kyd, author of a very successful and popular revenge tragedy, was arrested in the wake of government anger about what is now known as the Dutch Church libel; a poem, written in the style of his former room-mate, Christopher Marlowe, which had been posted on the wall of a church frequented by Huguenot immigrants.  The Privy Council had sanctioned the use of torture to discover the author of the poem.  Though the author wasn’t Kyd, he never recovered from his treatment in Bridewell prison and died the following year.  Christopher Marlowe was arrested soon after and released on bail, apparently being killed in a fight just ten days later.

It would be no wonder if, under such a regime, some writers were perfectly happy for their works to be published anonymously, or to even bear the names of other people.  Thus we should not necessarily judge it a terrible thing if Shakespeare published works under his name that were not his own.  In Thomas Heywood’s case, this was clearly without the author’s permission. But Robert Greene says explicitly that this is a service that some writers sought out.

Robert Greene Batillus Farewell to Folly 1591It is interesting how resistant mainstream scholarship is to this idea. When I discussed Greene’s statement with another scholar he insisted that Greene is referring to a poor or mediocre writer (‘Batillus’) trying to appear competent by engaging the services those who can write (i.e. parish clerks). But this is not what Greene says.  If you don’t believe me, read the passage for yourself.  When Greene says certain poets ‘get some other Batillus to set his name to their verses’ they are not engaging a scribe; they are persuading someone else to put his name on their work in order to avoid being publicly associated with something profane. Greene’s text is strong evidence that some writers used fronts in this period.

1590s ENGLAND / 1950s AMERICA

That this practice might have arisen in the Elizabethan era should not surprise us.  Similar human situations spawn similar strategies. We know that writers in at least one other repressive and politically paranoid era, finding pseudonyms not sufficiently protective or effective, co-opted real individuals to act as their fronts. The parallel can be found in 1950s Hollywood.[1]

Under McCarthyism, writers with suspected communist sympathies began to be hauled up in front of the House Un-American Activities Commission and questioned about their political affiliations.  Writers found to be communist sympathisers were black-listed, meaning they could no longer work as screenwriters for the big studios. Those who refused to name other communist sympathisers were jailed. In order to get around the prohibitions, certain black-listed writers secretly engaged people prepared to represent screenplays they had not written as their own.  Woody Allen’s The Front depicts the possibly comedic repercussions of such a practice, but the realities were distinctly unfunny.

Roman Holiday Dalton TrumboOne might imagine that such an arrangement would be impossible to maintain if the hidden writer were famous, or their work became a high profile success, but history shows that this is not the case.  In 1953, the Oscar for Best Screenplay went to the romantic comedy Roman Holiday, starring Audrey Hepburn, and was awarded to the supposed screenwriter Ian McLellan Hunter.  But the author of Roman Holiday’s screenplay was actually Dalton Trumbo. It is now known that from 1947 (when he became one of the ‘Hollywood Ten’) to 1960, Dalton Trumbo wrote or co-wrote seventeen screenplays for which he received no writing credit.

In Trumbo’s case the historical record has now been corrected, thanks to enormous efforts on his behalf by his son, and by the Writers Guild of America.  However, there are still numerous works from the era that remain wrongly ascribed to their fronts.  Alan Wald, professor of English and author of Writing from the Left, says that the writers who had employed fronts

were often in the difficult situation of having other people sign legal documents and even accept awards; thus, to reveal the names of fronts, even decades later, could bring lawsuits. However, it is now known that black radical novelist John O. Killens ‘fronted’ for blacklisted Abraham Polonsky in the important anti-racist film noir Odds Against Tomorrow. One former Communist who wrote Classics Comics in the 1950s made me promise never to reveal his identity.[2]

Even though some of the people who know the truth are still alive, the identity of many of these hidden writers will never be publicly known.  Bear in mind that in these cases the truth remains unknown despite the fact that these deceptions occurred in an era of telephones, recording devices, and general literacy. How much more difficult to retrieve the truth about writers’ identities from 400 years ago?

Playwrights in 1590s England and screenwriters in 1950s Hollywood were in not dissimilar positions, in that they were trying to express ideas freely in a political landscape where the free expression of ideas was considered dangerous.  The chief difference is that with Hollywood’s blacklisted writers only their livelihoods were at stake; for Elizabethan playwrights it was potentially their lives.  For though being executed for your writing was a rare occurrence — one suffered nevertheless by religious writers Edmund Campion and John Penry — the conditions in Elizabethan prisons were sufficiently poor for a prison stay to become a death sentence.  The poet and playwright Thomas Watson, a friend of Marlowe’s, seems to have died after being imprisoned.  And of those writers mentioned above who fell foul of the authorities, three of them (Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Kyd) appear to have died, and certainly dropped out of sight, within a couple of years of being brought to account by the powers-that-be.

CONTINUE>>>

[1] These ideas were first explored at length in Daryl Pinksen’s Marlowe’s Ghost: The Blacklisting of the Man Who Was Shakespeare (2008).

[2] Professor Alan Wald, author of ‘Writing From the Left’, interviewed on : http://www.crimetime.co.uk/features/marxistnoir.php

Click Here to Subscribe and we’ll notify you about new content.

Posted on by Dr Barber

Could Shakespeare Have Been a Front?

In Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, it was stated without equivocation that ‘early modern authors did not ever pretend to be other people’.[1]  Perhaps in the exact form it is expressed, that statement is true: neither of the best-known forms of attributional deception — employing a front, or agreeing to be a ghostwriter — could be described as ‘pretending to be other people’, exactly. But contrary to this confident assertion, we have evidence from the period that such arrangements did indeed take place. Writers in Shakespeare’s day sometimes wrote under false names and there is evidence some even used a ‘front’: a real person prepared to ‘play’ the author.

PLAGIARISM

Putting one’s name on the work of another can take several forms. One form that this takes is plagiarism. Most Shakespearean scholars seem comfortable with the idea that Shakespeare began his career by adapting the work of others, and will even argue that he was accused of plagiarism by his contemporary, Robert Greene. They are not envisaging wholesale plagiarism of the type undertaken by the spy novelist Q.R. Markham. Rather they are imagining an adaptation process of the kind that might lead Shakespeare to turn The Troublesome Reign of King John into The Life and Death of King John, The Taming of A Shrew into The Taming of The Shrew. One might argue that exactly this kind of process might lead title pages to transition from ‘newly corrected and amended by W.S.’ to ‘written by W.S.’ but there, the dishonesty begins, and there most scholars prefer to jump off the train of thought and return to safety, agreeing that the works we know as Shakespeare’s are of unparalleled genius and therefore Shakespeare the man is morally unassailable. But there is evidence from the era that in some cases a writer might deliberately engage someone to represent their work under his name.

SET HIS NAME TO THEIR VERSES

Robert Greene, in Farewell to Folly (1591), wrote of the practice of certain writers concealing their identities by what he called ‘underhand brokery’ or what we might understand nowadays as employing somebody to act as a ‘front’. He wrote that

Others….if they come to write or publish any thing in print, it is either distilled out of ballads or borrowed of Theological poets, which for their calling and gravity, being loth to have any profane pamphlets pass under their hand, get some other Batillus to set his name to their verses. [My emphasis.] Thus is the ass made proud by this underhand brokery. And he that cannot write true English without the aid of clerks of parish churches will need make himself the father of interludes.

‘Interludes’ is a 16th century term for stage plays. ‘Batillus’ was a mediocre poet who tried to claim some verses by Virgil as his own. Greene’s use of the name is a clear reference to misattribution, but in contrast to his Roman example, where ‘Batillus’ claimed a better writer’s verses without his consent, Greene says that certain writers of his time actually invite the modern Batillus ‘to set his name to their verses’. Why might anyone do such a thing, especially when the person in question is an ‘ass’ who ‘cannot write true English without the aid’ of parish clerks?

Greene says it is because they do not want to have their reputation—their ‘calling and gravity’— sullied by the ‘profane’ nature of what they have written. His testimony shows that an Elizabethan writer concealing their identity through the agency of another real person is not the ridiculous proposition that orthodox scholars suggest; to Greene it is a known practice. He refers to this practice as ‘underhand brokery’; a necessarily discreet business transaction aimed at protecting the identity of the author. There is, however, no ‘conspiracy’ required for this to occur; simply a handshake, and an exchange of a text and (most likely) some money.

COULD HE BE REFERRING TO SHAKESPEARE?

200px-Shakespeare_sigs_collectedThough the comment about not being able to write without the help of clerks will remind non-Stratfordians of Shakespeare’s six shaky signatures, it is very unlikely that the ‘Batillus’ he writes about is Shakespeare. It would be another two years before ‘William Shakespeare’ appeared on any publication, and seven years before it appeared on a play. What this evidence supports is not the idea of Shakespeare as a front, but rather the general principle of identity concealment, even to the point of using, as your cover, someone of limited literacy skills. Though he may not respect the arrangement, Greene (like Jonson in his epigram) does not reveal anyone’s identity. It has been suggested that Anthony Munday was his target, because elsewhere in the same publication, he criticises the play Fair Em, but that attack is not related to this passage. From the playwright’s manuscript of John a Kent and John a Cumber, Munday could clearly ‘write true English without the aid of clerks of parish churches’. And in any case, nobody, not even a Batillus, ever set their name to Fair Em. We’re unlikely to be able to work out Greene’s target, and it is not too much of a leap to say that this was his intention. He and other writers of the age routinely concealed the identities of those they criticised, and the reason was very simple.

CONTINUED>>>

[1] Andrew Hadfield in Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, edited by Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson, CUP 2013, 72.

Click Here to Subscribe and we’ll notify you about new content.

Posted on by Dr Barber

4. ‘Underhand brokery’ – Authors and the Authorities

Robert Greene Batillus Farewell to Folly 1591Others … if they come to write or publish any thing in print, it is either distilled out of ballads or borrowed of Theological poets, which for their calling and gravity, being loth to have any profane pamphlets pass under their hand, get some other Batillus to set his name to their verses: Thus is the ass made proud by this under hand brokery. And he that can not write true English without the help of Clerks of parish Churches, will needs make him self the father of interludes.
Robert Greene

This chapter looks at identity concealment among Early Modern Authors; the idea of the ‘hidden author’ that is at the heart of the Shakespeare authorship question. It investigates the evidence that some Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, in order to protect themselves from the negative consequences of publishing their works, went beyond anonymity to use ‘fronts’: real people who would put their name to a published work.

Read the first section, and continue through chapter by using the links at the bottom of each post. Sections are summarised below.

  • Could Shakespeare Have Been a Front?
    Was Shakespeare a front? An examination of the evidence that some Elizabethan writers used ‘fronts’ to protect their identities.
  • A Dangerous Age
    Elizabethan censorship didn’t just mean the banning and burning of books (though that happened) – it led to the imprisonment, torture and death of writers.
  • Defensive Anonymity
    Before 1594, nearly all plays were published anonymously. Playwrights had little choice in this. But other writers chose anonymity as a defensive strategy.
  • Shakespeare, the Queen, and Richard II
    Queen Elizabeth I’s testimony in the trial of John Hayward and her reaction to Shakespeare’s Richard II, with new work on her conversation with Lambard.
  • Concealed Poets
    In 1603, Sir Francis Bacon wrote to John Davies, who was riding to meet the new king asking that he ‘be good to concealed poets’. Who did he mean?

Click Here to Subscribe and we’ll notify you about new content.

Posted on by Dr Barber

Newly Augmented and Corrected

However, even putting The Troublesome Reign of King John aside, we must ask how so many plays came to be published under Shakespeare’s name that were not his own.  The ‘rogue publisher’ theory is appealing enough as a generality, but on interrogating the individual circumstances of each publisher and play, it begins to fall apart. The evidence suggests that Shakespeare acted as a broker in other areas of business, and George Buck’s approach to both him and Edward Juby on a matter of attribution suggests that he, like Juby, was fulfilling the broker’s role for his company. He is also, as we have seen, the best fit for Ben Jonson’s Poet-Ape: someone who transitioned from ‘buy[ing] the reversion of old plays’ to ‘mak[ing] each man’s wit his own’, and if Poet-Ape is Shakespeare, this is a viable explanation for the evidence pattern that we have.

loves labours lostNow the difficult question must be asked.  Many canonical plays had very similar title pages to the apocryphal plays.  Locrine was ‘Newly set forth, overseen and corrected, / By W.S.’.  Between 1598 and 1604, five different quartos were published with claims that the plays involved were edited (four of them explicitly by Shakespeare) for publication.  In 1598, Cuthbert Burby published Love’s Labour’s Lost, ‘Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere’.  In 1599, Andrew Wise (who had already published Richard II and Richard III as ‘By William Shake-speare’) published 1 Henry IV as ‘Newly corrected by W. Shake-speare.’

romeo julietIn the same year, Thomas Creede (publisher of Locrine) printed the (still anonymous) Romeo and Juliet for Cuthbert Burby as ‘Newly corrected, augmented and amended’.  In 1602, Creede printed a new edition of Richard III for Andrew Wise as ‘Newly augmented, by William Shakespeare.’  Nicholas Ling’s 1604 Hamlet stated it was ‘By William Shakespeare. Newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect Copy.’  Bearing in mind the possibility that Shakespeare was a play-broker who graduated from being the editor of works, to representing the works of others as his own, to what extent can we be sure that Shakespeare was the author of these plays?

This, of course, is the meat of the authorship question. But before addressing the evidence in detail, we must first establish the plausibility of the underlying premise, the hidden author.

CONTINUED>>>

Click Here to Subscribe and we’ll notify you about new content.

Posted on by Dr Barber