Author: Dr Barber

3. ‘So Bold A Thief’ – Who is Poet-Ape?

brokage poet-apePoor POET-APE, that would be thought our chief,
Whose works are e’en the frippery of wit,
From brokage is become so bold a thief,
As we, the robb’d, leave rage, and pity it.
Ben Jonson

This chapter explores whether William Shakespeare is in fact the only viable candidate for Ben Jonson’s ‘Poet-Ape’, a man who went from ‘brokage’ of ‘old plays’ to representing the works of others as his own … and whether this is the best explanation for the seven plays by other people which were published under Shakespeare’s name in his lifetime.

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

  • Jonson’s Poet-Ape
    In 1616, the year of William Shakespeare’s death, the playwright and satirist Ben Jonson published ‘Poet-Ape’, a poem about a man who went from ‘brokage’ to representing the plays of others as his own. Who was Jonson’s ‘Poet-Ape’?
  • Ambiguity and Interpretation
    Jonson didn’t coin the term ‘poet-ape’. What did he mean by it? One thing’s for sure – ‘poet-ape’ does not equate, in Jonson’s mind, with ‘actor’.
  • Plagiarism
    From Jonson’s description, the identity of Poet-Ape will clearly be a name with which scholars of early modern drama will be familiar. Is Jonson accusing Thomas Dekker or John Marston of plagiarism?
  • Thomas Lord Cromwell – ‘Written by W.S.’
    In 1602, the play Thomas Lord Cromwell was published, declaring it was ‘Written by W.S.’ Most scholars subscribe to the idea that this was a piratical publication. But as a play owned by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, it can be seen as part of a pattern of Shakespeare’s play-broking.
  • The London Prodigal – ‘Written by William Shakespeare’
    In 1605, The London Prodigal was published as ‘written by William Shakespeare’, the first of the apocrypha to be so boldly attributed, and again it was associated with Shakespeare’s company. The publisher was Nathaniel Butter, who published King Lear three years later.
  • A Yorkshire Tragedy – ‘Written by William Shakespeare’
    A Yorkshire Tragedy, was published as ‘written by Shakespeare’ in 1608 by the man who had published Henry V six years earlier. Piratical or authorised, further evidence of Shakespeare’s work as a play-broker?
  • The Puritan – ‘Written by W.S.’
    The publisher of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, George Eld, is responsible for publishing The Puritan, or the Widow of Watling Street, as ‘Written by W.S.’ Were these initials supplied to Eld by Shakespeare himself?
  • The Troublesome Reign of King John – ‘Written by W. Sh’
    The Troublesome Reign of King John was published as ‘Written by W.Sh.’ in 1611. Is this another piece of evidence for Shakespeare’s play-broking activities?
  • Newly Augmented and Corrected
    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.

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George Buck

We are fortunate enough to possess, in the public archives, the reaction of someone who knew who wrote the play Locrine.  The title page of a copy owned by George Buck (sometimes referred to as Buc), who in 1603 would be knighted and become James I’s Master of the Revels, bears the following hand-written inscription:[1]

Charles Tilney wrote a
Tragedy of this matter
he named Estrild: which
I think is this. it was lost
by his death. now some
fellow hath published it.
I made dumb shows for it.
which I yet have. G.B.

This note testifies that Buck’s late cousin Charles Tilney was the original author of Locrine.  Tilney had been executed in 1586 for his part in the Babington Plot, so the play was at least a decade old by the time it was published. The text shows signs of revision; there are clear borrowings from Edmund Spenser which could not have been added in Tilney’s lifetime.  Nevertheless Buck recognises the play as the one originally written by his cousin, a play for which Buck himself wrote the dumb shows — that is, sections of the drama to be acted without speaking.  Observing that ‘some fellow’ has published it, he is keenly aware that the fellow in question, one ‘W.S’, is not the author.

And this becomes particularly interesting when you consider that Buck is one of the very few people who record a conversation with William Shakespeare.  Stratford neighbour Richard Quiney mentions in a letter that Shakespeare is thinking of buying tithes; his lodger Thomas Greene records in his diary conversations with his landlord about enclosing common land, and Thomas Heywood apparently has words with him about his name being on the title page of a collection of poems which include Heywood’s; but George Buck talks to him about the authorial attribution of a play.

The play in question is George A Greene, The Pinner of Wakefield.  At the time Buck scribbled on his copy of Locrine, he did not apparently know the identity of the person who had ‘overseen and corrected it’; that person was just ‘some fellow’. Given his personal connection with the play, however, it seems reasonable that he might have made enquiries to discover who that ‘fellow’ was.  And when, a few years later, he acquired an anonymous 1599 copy of George A Greene, and wondered who the author might be, it appears that the first person he sought out to ask was William Shakespeare.   On the title page he noted:[2]

Written by …………. a minister who acted
the pinners part in it himself. Teste W. Shakespeare

And beneath this,

Ed. Juby saith that this play was made by Robert Greene.

James Shapiro describes this as Buck’s ‘flesh and blood encounter with a man he knew as both actor and playwright’ but in fact we have no idea whether Buck knew Shakespeare as an actor or a playwright. What seems much more likely is that he approached Shakespeare for this information because he knew that Shakespeare bought and sold plays.  Had he, as seems likely, been curious as to the identity of the ‘fellow’ who published his cousin’s play, it is Shakespeare in a play-broking role that he would have uncovered.

The person from whom he seeks a second opinion, Edward Juby, was an actor and occasional playwright, but what seems more pertinent here is that Juby bought plays for the Admiral’s Men.  Of all the people Buck might approach for information, he must have been aware that the people most likely to know would be the company play-brokers.  That Juby was the documented play-broker of the Admiral’s Men surely increases the likelihood that Shakespeare was the play-broker for the Lord Chamberlain’s, given that Buck has asked them the same question.

But what of the answer?  Though we cannot be entirely sure, the order of the inscriptions makes it probable that it was Shakespeare who was approached first.  His unsatisfactory answer is reminiscent of his Belott-Mountjoy testimony; a selective or defective memory fails to supply the author’s name, for which Buck leaves a blank to be filled.  His answer is also distinctly implausible: a minister of the church would not be suffered to act on the public stage, and Buck would know this.[3]  None the wiser after seeking Shakespeare’s opinion, Buck sought out Juby and gained a direct and clear answer: the author was Robert Greene, who had died in 1592.  Scholars, studying the text of the play, have determined that Juby’s answer was correct.   Shakespeare’s answer, in the light of this, smacks of obfuscation.  He didn’t know (or didn’t want to reveal what he did know), so he made something up.

Buck was clearly very interested in correct authorial attribution.  Two important conclusions can be derived from his title page inscriptions involving Shakespeare.  Firstly, that the likelihood of his being the play-broker for the Lord-Chamberlain’s Men is increased by Buck’s approaching both him and the Admiral’s play-broking counterpart Juby.  And secondly, that both title pages (Locrine and George A Greene) can be interpreted as linking Shakespeare with a practice of obfuscation and mis-attribution.

CONTINUED>>>

[1] This inscription is presented in modern spelling, with contractions and errors corrected. The edge of the title page is damaged, meaning some words and parts of words have been lost, but the re-instated version is widely accepted.  The original version is as follows (with missing text bracketed):

Char. Tilney wrot[e a]
Tragedy of this mattr [which]
hee named Estrild: [which]
I think is this. it was [lost?]
by his death. & now s[ome]
fellow hath published [it.]
I made du[m]be shewes for it.
w[h]ch I yet haue. G. B.

[2] Again, the spelling has been modernised, and missing letters restored.

[3] This play was certainly a public play. Henslowe’s diary records its performance on five separate occasions, by Sussex’s Men, from 29 Dec 1593 to 22 Jan 1594.

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Play Broker?

It is clear from the many legal documents connected to his land-holding, tithe buying, grain dealing, and money-lending, that William Shakespeare was always looking for a way to turn a profit.   Is it likely that his natural profit-making and middle-man tendencies ceased when he became involved in the business of theatre?  The main product of a theatre company is the performance of plays, and although some might be written in-house, the majority had to be bought from the available pool of writers.  As a share-holder, it is reasonable to think that William Shakespeare, a person clearly adept at buying and selling, might involve himself in purchasing suitable texts.  Once bought, they belonged to the company.

Though the sum a company could gain from selling a play for publication was only estimated to be around thirty shillings this could nevertheless recoup a proportion of the cost to the company of buying the play from the writer.  Thirty shillings is approximately the same sum that Shakespeare went through the courts to recover from Philip Rogers in 1604, so it should not be considered insubstantial. It was a good night’s box office takings for Henslowe at The Rose. A performance of Henry VI on 19 May 1592 brought in exactly thirty shillings, whereas a performance on 11 June 1594 of The Taming of A Shrew (an early version of the play later to become Shakespeare’s The Taming of The Shrew) netted only nine. In addition to a manuscript sale making the company the equivalent of a good night’s takings with minimal effort, the title pages of published plays posted around the city of London as advertisements could function as free promotion for the associated theatre company, who in some cases appeared to have revived old plays to coincide with their publication.

In the Elizabethan period, plays were rarely connected publicly their authors, being associated instead with the theatre companies that owned them. If a play was performed but unpublished — as is the case for just over half of the Shakespeare canon until 1623 — most people would not have known the identity of the author.  It would be a century before playwright’s names began appearing on playbills.[1]  Throughout the 1590s, it was also common practice for plays not only to be performed anonymously, but to be published anonymously too.  Indeed, up until 1594, the year that Shakespeare became a shareholder with the Lord Chamberlain’s men, only one writer — George Peele — had been attributed on the title page of a play originally performed on the public stage.[2]  That year, publishing practice changed, and seven out of the eighteen published plays that have survived from 1594 feature an author’s name. By the turn of the century about half of all published plays were still anonymous, but subsequently naming the author became increasingly common.  This shift towards publishing plays with an authorial attribution appears to have been linked with a general move by publishers to present dramatic works as suitable for ‘gentlemen readers’ by associating them with an originating author rather than the collaborative process by which so many plays in fact came about.

The diary of theatre-owner Philip Henslowe reveals that from the summer of 1597 to the summer of 1600, sixty per cent (thirty out of fifty-two) of the plays the company bought were co-authored, but in the same period, not a single one of the thirty-two published plays acknowledges more than one author.  Less than twelve per cent of the plays published in the forty years from 1584 to 1623 bears more than a single author’s name on the title page.  This mismatch may be read two ways.  Either co-authored works were rarely of a high enough quality to qualify as readable literature, or publishers were deliberately representing co-authored works as being the fruit of a single mind.  Certainly when play extracts were presented in the poetic anthology England’s Parnassus, editor Robert Allott attributed extracts from jointly-authored plays to one author only, generally the more famous one.  It may be wise, therefore, to see single authorial attributions not as accurate records of authorship, but rather as a marketing tool that helped to lift the ‘respectability’ of a play into the realm of literature.

A good parallel to the position of the Elizabethan playwright is that of the Hollywood screenwriter.  For a start, only people in the industry will generally be aware of who wrote the screenplay of even a very successful movie.  Though, unlike Elizabethan plays, films will always give at least one writer credit for the script, screenwriting credits do not always reflect the contributions of those involved.  The chief name attached to a screenplay is rarely the only writer and quite often not the originator of the text. The entire screenplay of the 1998 film Ronin was written by David Mamet, but even after arbitration with the Writers’ Guild of America, he was denied a film credit under his own name, being forced to accept it under a pseudonym. And as I will discuss in a future post, there are documented cases where screenwriting credits — and at least one Oscar — have been awarded to someone who didn’t create a single word of dialogue.

Let us, then, add some of these details together.  In Shakespeare’s era, a play, once sold to a theatre company, was the property of the company’s shareholders.   The text of that play, once sold to a publisher, was the property of the publishers.  Writers who were not also company share-holders had no control about how (or whether) their work was sold on. Writers were rarely credited for their works in the period. Even when they were, there was a good chance that co-authored texts would bear only a single name because that was deemed a successful marketing strategy.

No-one knows for certain when William Shakespeare first became involved in the business end of theatre, but the earliest theatrical record citing his name dates from 15 March 1595, in an entry in the Treasurer of the Chamber’s accounts recording £20 paid to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men for plays performed in front of the Queen the preceding Christmas.  The payment was made out:

To William Kemp, William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage, servants to the Lord Chamberlain, upon the Council’s warrant dated at Whitehall 15th March [1595], for two several comedies or interludes showed by them before her majesty in Christmas time last part viz St. Stephen’s day and Innocents day.[3]

His name as one of the Lord Chamberlain’s ‘servants’ denotes that William Shakespeare, like the company clown William Kemp and lead actor Richard Burbage was, by 1594, a shareholder of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.  The company appears to have been founded in the summer of that year; Henslowe’s diary notes performances by The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, alongside those of the Lord Admiral’s Men. Not all actors in the company would be shareholders; some were hired men, paid per performance. But shareholders took a cut of profits and were involved in the business side of things.  1594 was also the year when somebody sold the playscript of Locrine to the printer Thomas Creede; it was entered into the Stationers Register, without an author’s name, on 20 July 1594.

At this point, there were only two publications with the name ‘William Shakespeare’ on them, both long poems.  Venus and Adonis had been published the previous June, and The Rape of Lucrece, registered 9 May 1594, was probably on the book stalls by the time Thomas Creede bought Locrine.  Both poems were published by Richard Field, a man raised in Stratford-upon-Avon who very likely would have known William Shakespeare.   Field’s connection to Shakespeare is a point to which we will return, but one thing is certain; he didn’t publish plays.

Shakespeare play broker LocrineThomas Creede printed or published a number of canonical Shakespeare plays.  In the same year that he published Locrine, 1594, he printed The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster for the publisher Thomas Millington – a revised version of which would become Henry VI Part 2 in 1623’s First Folio.  Henry VI Part 2 and Titus Andronicus were the first plays in the Shakespeare canon to be published. Both were published in 1594, with no author’s name attached.  The following year, The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (later to become Henry VI Part 3) was the third Shakespeare play to be published, again anonymously; and Locrine was published as being ‘newly set forth, overseen and corrected’ ( you will note, not ‘written’) by ‘W.S.’  It is therefore fair to say that Shakespeare’s career as a published dramatist, and as a person associated with the plays of others, coincided exactly with the formation of The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, in which he was a shareholder.

It has been argued that the initials on Locrine might be those, not of William Shakespeare, but of minor playwright and scrivener Wentworth Smith.   There are a number of reasons for rejecting this possibility.  For a start, the only record we have of Wentworth Smith’s playwriting activity begins seven years after Locrine was registered. Smith co-authored fifteen plays for the competing company, the Lord Admiral’s Men, between April 1601 and March 1603.  None of these plays were successful enough to survive. But more crucially, Wentworth Smith was never in a position to sell his plays, or the plays of others, for publication. He was not a theatre company shareholder, and it was theatre companies who owned the plays they performed.  This play was not Wentworth Smith’s play to sell in any capacity. But it may well have been Shakespeare’s.

CONTINUED>>>

[1] John Dryden notes this new practice with surprise in 1698; Erne p.44.

[2] I am indebted to Lukas Erne’s Shakespeare  as Literary Dramatist for many of the statistics in these paragraphs, and have been much influenced in my thinking by his chapter on the legitimation of printed playbooks (pp.31-55)

[3] The record in fact says 1594, but it means 1595 in our modern calendar. The discrepancy is due to the fact that until 1752, the new year officially began on Lady Day, 25 March, rather than 1 January. A vestige of this remains in the fact that the tax year begins on 6 April, which is 25 March adjusted for the days lost when the calendars were changed over.

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Marriage Broker

There is another reason to think that Shakespeare may have had talents as a middle-man, and derived part of his income this way. Although activity of this sort is generally only recorded when it goes wrong, we know from the break-down of one particular negotiated deal, that Shakespeare acted as a marriage broker. During 1604 he was lodging with wig-making family the Mountjoys on the corner of Silver Street and Monkwell Street in the Cripplegate area of London. According to William Shakespeare’s deposition, dated 11th May 1612, Mrs Mountjoy asked him to ‘move and persuade’ Stephen Belott, her husband’s former apprentice, to marry their only daughter. According to Stephen Belott, a dowry of £60 was promised, with a further £200 to be bequeathed by Christopher Mountjoy in his will. Subsequently, Christopher Mountjoy disputed any such amounts had been agreed, and eight years after the marriage, Stephen Belott went to court in an attempt to settle the matter.

In his deposition, William Shakespeare said that a ‘portion’ had been agreed, but claimed not to remember the amount agreed upon, or when it was to be paid. Whether his forgetfulness was genuine, or arose from a wish to be neutral and discreet, is impossible to tell; when not under oath he had given the figure as about £50, and Charles Nicholl concludes that his memory was ‘more selective than defective’.[1]

Since the discovery of the Belott-Mountjoy papers in 1909, commentators have been inclined to see Shakespeare’s role as marriage broker in a somewhat romantic light, imagining the author of the Sonnets and Romeo & Juliet conducting the hand-fasting of two lovers. But the arrangement appears to have been far more tempered by financial considerations than by love; since not only did Shakespeare have to ‘persuade’ Belott to marry his former boss’s daughter, but the promised payments for doing so appear to have been the chief object of persuasion.

William Shakespeare, described on his deposition as ‘of Stratford upon Avon in the county of Warwick, gentleman’, emerges from the Belott-Mountjoy case as an effective negotiator. His selective memory under oath suggests he was also a discreet one, unwilling to divulge what might be termed sensitive commercial information. As with his holding 1.23 tonnes of malted barley in a time of famine, the best explanation for his role in the marriage of Stephen Belott and Mary Mountjoy is that he was the broker; that neutral yet persuasive central party who acts as an anonymous buffer, matching the needs of buyer and seller, while potentially making a profit in the process.

CONTINUED>>>

[1] Charles Nicholl, The Lodger on Silver Street, p.13.

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Loan Broker

The only surviving letter written to him – though apparently never delivered – also attests to his role as a middle-man, an arranger. In October 1598, the Stratford-upon-Avon corporation was in trouble. Richard Quiney—whose son would marry Shakespeare’s daughter in 1616— wrote from the Bell Inn in London to ‘To my Loving good friend & countryman’, begging him to help with arranging a £30 loan (then a very sizeable sum of money) on behalf of the Stratford Corporation. Many biographers have read this document as Shakespeare being asked for the loan directly, but the wording suggests otherwise. Quiney says:

You shall neither lose credit nor money by me, the Lord willing, & now but persuade your self so as I hope & you shall not need to fear butt with all hearty thankfulness I will hold my time & content your friend, & if we Bargain farther you shall be the paymaster yourself.

The key phrase in understanding the request as loan arrangement rather than loan provision is ‘I will hold my time & content your friend’. He is reassuring Shakespeare that he will keep to the repayment schedule and thus satisfy ‘your friend’: the person of Shakespeare’s acquaintance who will provide the money. Were the loan to come from Shakespeare himself, Quiney would say ‘content you’. However, when he goes on to say ‘if we Bargain farther you shall be the paymaster yourself’ there is a suggestion that he might also want to borrow funds from Shakespeare personally. Quiney’s father Adrian had suggested to him in another letter that he might get a loan from Shakespeare to finance the purchase of wool stockings.

CONTINUED>>>

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Grain Broker

Much has been made, in recent years, of the fact that Shakespeare apparently hoarded grain in a time of famine.

His name appears on a list, compiled in February 1598, of Stratford householders who, against orders drawn up by the Privy Council, were holding large quantities of grain. The largest holding in the area was eighteen quarters of malt; Shakespeare held ten. Only a dozen men had more than Shakespeare, according to E.K. Chambers. Shakespeare’s holding surpasses, by a considerable amount, the quantity of malt that would have been needed for household brewing purposes. Ten quarters is eighty bushels, which equates to 640 gallons of malted barley, weighing an estimated 2,720 lbs or 1.234 metric tonnes.

A sound explanation for his holding such a quantity of barley in a time of shortage is brokerage. It is good business practice to buy a commodity when it is cheap and plentiful, and sell it when it is in short supply and will fetch a good price. There is no question that Shakespeare sold grain; in 1604 he sued the apothecary Philip Rogers for thirty-five shillings and ten pence, plus ten shillings damages, to recover a small loan and the unpaid balance on a sale of twenty bushels of malt. By that time he was the owner of 107 acres of farmland, and the grain may have come from his own acreage, although it is most unlikely that he farmed the land himself. But in 1598, when he was recorded as one of Stratford’s grain-hoarders, he had no land that we know of besides the garden at New Place. A plausible explanation for his holding, therefore, is that he was acting as a broker or middle-man; he had bought the grain from a farmer at a lower price and was intending to sell it at a higher one.

CONTINUED>>>

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Shakespeare the Businessman

The name of William Shakespeare is so powerful in the collective imagination that it’s hard to achieve a neutral stance when considering it.  So let us first imagine that all the non-literary documents connected to William Shakespeare belong to a man called John Smith.  A historian asked to examine those records and conclude what Smith did for a living, would conclude he was a successful businessman.

shakespeare businessmanBy 4 May 1597 (aged thirty-three), he was rich enough to buy New Place, the second largest house in Stratford-upon-Avon.  In January 1598 it was reported that he was looking to buy some tithes ‘in Shottery or thereabouts’.  In 1602 he bought 107 acres of land and a cottage in Chapel Lane, which he rented out.  In July 1605 he bought one fifth of the Stratford tithes for the sum of £440, which generated £60 a year income.[1]  To put these amounts in perspective, a schoolteacher at the time earned around £18 a year. For ten months, from August 1608 to June 1609, he pursued debtor John Addenbrooke, and then his surety Thomas Hornby, through the Stratford courts for the sum of £6. On 10 March 1613, he paid £140 for a share of Blackfriars Gatehouse in London.   Whatever else William Shakespeare knew how to do, he knew how to make money.

CONTINUED>>>

[1] £38 net after paying £5 a year to the original leaseholder and £17 to the Stratford corporation

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2. ‘Some Fellow’ – The Man Who Met Shakespeare

Locrine BucCharles Tilney wrote a
Tragedy of this matter
he named Estrild: which
I think is this. it was l[ost]
by his death. now s[ome]
fellow hath published it.
I made dumb shows for it.
which I yet have. G.B.

This chapter explores the evidence that William Shakespeare consistently acted as a middleman, or broker – and that once he got involved in the business of theatre, he bought and sold plays for his company.

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

  • Shakespeare the Businessman
    Whatever else William Shakespeare knew how to do, he knew how to make money. The documentary evidence shows he was a successful businessman.
  • Grain Broker
    William Shakespeare hoarded grain in a time of famine. Over a ton, at a time when he had no lands. He wasn’t a farmer. So was he a grain broker?
  • Loan Broker
    The only surviving letter written to Shakespeare asks him to arrange (not provide) a loan. This attests to Shakespeare’s role as a loan broker.
  • Marriage Broker
    Shakespeare’s role as a middle-man is supported by evidence that he was also a marriage broker, as attested by documents from the Belott-Mountjoy case.
  • Play Broker?
    Was William Shakespeare also a play broker? The first apocryphal play appears within months of the evidence he has become a theatre company shareholder.
  • George Buck
    George Buck asked Shakespeare who wrote the anonymous play George a Greene, and wrote down his answer. What does that answer tell us about Shakespeare?

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