Category: section

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.

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[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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Jonson’s Poet-Ape

In 1616, the year of William Shakespeare’s death, the playwright and satirist Ben Jonson published his Works of Benjamin Jonson. In addition to his plays it contained his epigrams, including this one:

On Poet-Ape

Poor 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.
At first he made low shifts, would pick and glean,
Buy the reversion of old plays; now grown
To a little wealth, and credit in the scene,
He takes up all, makes each man’s wit his own:
And, told of this, he slights it. Tut, such crimes
The sluggish gaping auditor devours;
He marks not whose ’twas first: and after-times
May judge it to be his, as well as ours.
Fool! as if half eyes will not know a fleece
From locks of wool, or shreds from the whole piece?

This poem, written during the time when William Shakespeare was active, tells a story. Let me share one interpretation of that story. Someone whom Jonson refers to as Poet-Ape has transitioned from being a play-broker to openly putting his name on other people’s plays. He began by buying ‘the reversion of old plays’ but now ‘makes each man’s wit his own’. This man, says Jonson, ‘would be thought our chief’. Chief what? Since Jonson was a poet and playwright, then presumably, chief writer of the period. It is not clear whether Jonson means that Poet-Ape ‘will be thought our chief’, which points towards Shakespeare, or that he has be pretensions to be thought of this way i.e. ‘would like to be thought our chief’, which might apply to anyone. But the person he is mocking is certainly involved in the theatre business, and has made a success of it and money out of it, according to Jonson.

A poet-ape is simply someone who apes a poet — mimics one, or pretends be one — but isn’t one. Many readers will, quite understandably, balk at the idea that the person he is calling Poet-Ape could possibly be William Shakespeare. Shakespeare is England’s national poet. How could someone like Ben Jonson, who referred to Shakespeare in the First Folio as ‘star of poets’, also refer to him as Poet-Ape? We are venturing here into the territory of the Shakespeare authorship question, and indeed this poem — never mentioned in conventional Shakespeare biographies — is a key exhibit for non-Stratfordians, those who doubt that William Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon wrote the works attributed to him.

For Jonson to be referring to the same man as both ‘star of poets’ and ‘Poet-Ape’ is a contradiction too significant for many people to swallow. But Jonson’s conflicting opinions of Shakespeare, though frequently underplayed, are well known. In conversation with William Drummond, for example, he apparently said that ‘Shakespeare wanted art’. A number of orthodox scholars have accepted that Jonson lampooned Shakespeare in one of his plays, and in his private diaries, he appears to criticise him. We will return to the complexities of Jonson, but in the meantime, we should investigate whether Shakespeare is really the best fit for his ‘Poet-Ape’.

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Ambiguity and Interpretation

Literary texts are notoriously slippery, and evade straight-forward interpretation; indeed, the entire academic discipline of English Literature depends upon that being so.

second-best bed willEven legal texts, deliberately written to be unambiguous, are open to interpretation: consider, for example, the line in Shakespeare’s will which bequeaths to his wife Anne his ‘second-best bed’. Even where it is clear what the writer intended (to will Shakespeare’s second-best bed to his wife), scholars argue about the underlying motivation. Was it because it was the marital bed, and had sentimental value (the best bed being saved for visitors)? Or was Shakespeare deliberately snubbing the wife he no longer loved by bequeathing her something shoddy? This bequest to his wife is also an interlineation: Anne was not mentioned in the original text of the will, and this line was squeezed in as if it was an afterthought. Scholars argue about the meaning of that, too. Is this because Shakespeare wanted to make sure she received this important romantic item? Or as a legal ruse to prevent her challenging the will — which passes the bulk of his estate to their eldest daughter Susanna — on the grounds that her husband had not remembered her?

Jonson’s epigram is far more slippery than Shakespeare’s will. As we shall see, it was a dangerous age for writers to speak their minds, and those who wrote satirical epigrams never named their targets, always using language in such a way as to leave their exits open. Some authorship sceptics will tell you that ‘Poet-Ape’ is Jonson’s word for actor, and that this narrows the field towards identifying William Shakespeare as his target. Actors are ‘poet-apes’ in the sense that the writer Robert Greene, addressing three poet-playwrights in 1592, described them as ‘those puppets… that spake from our mouths’. But the term was first coined by Sir Philip Sidney, who in his Apology for Poetry, said that bad poetry was not the fault of poets but of poet-apes: those who thought they could write good poetry but couldn’t. Ben Jonson himself actually distinguished them from actors when he wrote in the prologue of his play Poetaster (1601) ‘Are there no Players here? no Poet-Apes…?’, since he continues ‘Either of these would help me’. So his epigram isn’t necessarily fingering an actor.

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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, since this person has ‘grown to a little wealth, and credit in the scene.’   It is a writer, for his works are ‘the frippery of wit’.  It has been suggested that this poem arose out of the so-called War of the Theatres, and is directed at either Thomas Dekker or John Marston.  The War of the Theatres is the name given to the satirical feud that developed between Jonson on one side, and Dekker and Marston on the other, between 1599 and 1602. Jonson’s Poetaster, in which he first used the term ‘poet-ape’, was part of this feud.  If Jonson is calling either Dekker or Marston ‘Poet-Ape’, he is presumably accusing them of being bad poets who recycle other people’s words.

It was common enough for writers to echo and in some cases even plagiarise parts of other people’s works, or even to write thinly-veiled copies of other people’s plays; there were no copyright laws, and theatres required a constant supply of new material.  As Anna Bayman puts it in her study of Dekker’s prose pamphlets, ‘the habit of plagiarism and reuse of material was so commonplace that it could be considered orthodox literary practice’.[1]  Though Dekker railed against derivative poets in his pamphlet The Wonderful Year (1603), calling upon the Muses to ‘banish these Word-pirates… into the gulf of Barbarism’ he was distinctly derivative himself.  Jonson accused Dekker of plagiarism after the latter’s Satiromastix used one of Jonson’s characters (Tucca) from Poetaster.

Yet there is one word in Jonson’s epigram which means we must rule out Dekker’s being Jonson’s Poet-Ape, and that is the word ‘wealth’.   According to the Dictionary of National Biography Dekker was ‘constantly shadowed by debt’ and occasionally overwhelmed by it. He was imprisoned for debt in 1598 and 1599, and then again in 1612, spending seven years behind bars after failing to repay £40 which he had borrowed from the playwright John Webster’s father.

So is John Marston Jonson’s target?  He appears to have been a little wealthier, and Jonson had accused Marston (in the guise of the character Crispinus) of stealing his poetry in Poetaster, saying ‘hang him Plagiary’ (4.3.96).  There is no evidence that Marston was a broker of any kind, but the accusation of ‘brokage’ need not mean that the target was a play-broker. John Marston twice used the word ‘broker’ in situations similar to Jonson’s epigram, and in those passages the term just means to recycle the ideas of others, or to pass them down second-hand.  In Certain Satires I Marston writes of someone who ‘scornes the viol and the scraping stick, / And yet’s but Broker of another’s wit’.  In The Scourge of Villainy we find someone ‘Who ne’er did ope[n] his Apish gurning mouth / But to retail and broke another’s wit.’   In other words, ‘brokage’ may refer to a lesser form of plagiarism, where ‘theft’ refers to the larger form.  There is also nothing in the poem that suggests printed plays.  Though the ‘sluggish gaping auditor’ who ‘marks not whose ’twas first’ could conceivably be an official of the stationer’s company who registered plays, ‘auditor’ also means ‘listener’.

There is an interesting echo in Jonson’s epigram of a scene in an anonymous play of the period, The First Part of the Return to Parnassus, which was performed at Cambridge university around 1601.  In this play, a foolish young man named ‘Gullio’ ‘apes’ poets by quoting, according to a character called Ingenioso, ‘pure Shakespeare and shreds of poetry that he hath gathered at the theatres’, generally misquoting them.  The final line of Jonson’s ‘Poet-Ape’ uses the same word, ‘shreds’, in the final line of his epigram: ‘shreds from the whole piece’.  Ingenioso, like Jonson, refers to this practice as ’theft’: ‘O monstrous theft! I think he will run through a whole book of Samuel Daniel’s.’  He says this in response to a quote from Romeo and Juliet, interestingly associating Shakespeare’s play with misattribution.

REVERSION

So Jonson’s Poet-Ape could be someone who, like Gullio, quotes shreds of other people’s poetry and is (wrongly) thought by his listeners to be have originated those lines himself.   This person is a figure on the theatre scene, whose works are witty. We are likely to have heard of him.  Because he is wealthy, he cannot be Dekker, but could be Marston, whom Jonson had already accused of plagiarism and recycling (‘brokage’)  There is just one sticking place; ‘Poet-Ape’ has bought plays.  Jonson explicitly says that this is how he began: he would ‘buy the reversion of old plays’.  Now you could argue that any aspiring playwright might buy plays in order to study how successful ones were constructed, but there is something about Jonson’s phrasing—buying ‘the reversion’ of a play—that suggests a different kind of buying; something more like a business transaction.   A ‘reversion’ is a term from property law and is a future interest retained by the grantor when the lease expires.  A reversion explains how a play might sometimes be performed by another company than the one that owned it.  And to buy a ‘reversion’ of a play would mean that when that agreement expired, the play would belong to the new owner.   We have no evidence that Marston bought old plays.  His name does not appear on old plays that weren’t his.  Shakespeare’s does.

Just because a piece of evidence doesn’t exist now, it doesn’t mean that it never did. But we can only argue from the evidence we have. Of course one can speculate that Marston bought the rights to old plays, but it is most unlikely. He was not a share-holder in an acting company. Indeed, very few writers held that particular position, and no-one considered a writer of note, except for Shakespeare.  Perhaps there is another writer of ‘wealth and credit in the scene’ whose works were ‘the frippery of wit’, who ‘would [like to?] be thought our chief’ and who bought ‘the reversion of old plays’ but the only one for whom all the evidence exists is Shakespeare.   He is documented as a theatre company shareholder, his grain-related and marriage negotiation activities suggest he involved himself in brokerage outside the theatre, Buck’s seeking his comment on the attribution of George A Greene (and the parallel comment from Juby) suggests he did so within the theatre, and — most critically — his name appeared on plays and poems that were not his.

Which Elizabethan or Jacobean writers of note, active in the period 1590-1616, had works published under their names while they were alive which we know to be written by others?  As far as I can ascertain, the only certain answer to that question is William Shakespeare.  There is no other writer of the period who fits Jonson’s description so perfectly.  Given the prominent role of Shakespeare’s father in the wool trade, Jonson’s final fleece metaphor could even be another identification mark.  There is no better match for Jonson’s description, or indeed any notable writer of the period, besides Shakespeare, whose name was appended, as author, to works he didn’t write.

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[1] Anna Bayman, Thomas Dekker and the Culture of Pamphleteering in Early Modern London, p.57

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Thomas Lord Cromwell – ‘Written by W.S.’

As we have seen, if Shakespeare was a play broker, his practice in this regard seems to have begun with a revised version of an old play (Locrine), just as Jonson describes with Poet-Ape.  The historical record is of course imperfect; we do not know what is missing, what destroyed. But from the plays that are extant, the next to be published under Shakespeare’s initials was not for another seven years. 1602 saw the publication of Thomas Lord Cromwell, whose author is unknown and disputed. There is a marked step forward in the claim of its title page, for where Locrine was ‘edited, corrected and overseen’, Thomas Lord Cromwell was ‘written by W.S.’ The initials still allow for a degree of deniability.  Had William Shakespeare been challenged on this claim of authorship, he could have denied that he was the ‘W.S.’ of the title page.

thomas lord cromwellAnd of course, it might not be him; again, Wentworth Smith has been forwarded as the possible culprit, and the actor William Sly.  But there are no records of William Sly ever authoring a play or even claiming to do so.  Wentworth Smith at this time was fully engaged in writing plays for rival company the Lord Admiral’s Men and there is no evidence he wrote plays for anyone else. For if we accept that these apocryphal plays were supplied to publishers by our ‘W.S.’, Thomas Lord Cromwell’s title page bears another small but significant escalation; it tells prospective readers that the play has been ‘sundry times publicly acted by the Right Honourable Lord Chamberlain his Servants’. This play, in other words, was owned by Shakespeare’s company.

By the time of its publication, the following eight editions of seven plays had been published linking the name ‘William Shakespeare’ to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men:

  • Richard II (1598): ‘As it hath been publicly acted by the Right Honourable the Lord Chamberlain his servants. By William Shake-speare.’
  • Richard III (1598): ‘As it hath been lately acted by the Right honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. By William Shake-speare.’
  • A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600): ‘As it hath been sundry times publicly acted, by the Right honourable, the Lord Chamberlain his servants. Written by William Shakespeare.’
  • 2 Henry IV (1600): ‘As it hath been sundry times publicly acted by the right honourable, the Lord Chamberlain his servants. Written by William Shakespeare.’
  • Much Ado About Nothing (1600): ‘As it hath been sundry times publicly acted by the right honourable, the Lord Chamberlain his servants. Written by William Shakespeare.’
  • The Merchant of Venice (1600): ‘As it hath been diverse times acted by the Lord Chamberlain his Servants. Written by William Shakespeare.’
  • Richard III (1602): ‘As it hath been lately acted by the Right Honourable the Lord Chamberlain his servants. Newly augmented, by William Shakespeare.’
  • The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602): ‘By William Shakespeare. As it hath been diverse times acted by the right Honourable my Lord Camberlaines servants. Both before her Majesty, and else-where.’

Given how strongly linked the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and the name ‘William Shakespeare’ had become, it seems reasonable that anyone picking up a copy of Thomas Lord Cromwell in 1602 would make the assumption that ‘W.S.’ was ‘William Shakespeare’.  Who was behind this attribution?

As leading scholar Jonathan Bate points out in his introduction to William Shakespeare & Others, the identification of a play’s original acting company was a mark of authenticity as important as the playwright’s name. Addressing the problem of the apocryphal plays that have Shakespeare’s name or initials, in addition to the name of his company, Bate says:

He might have commissioned them. He might have polished up the raw scripts. As a key member of the company, he explicitly or implicitly signed them off for performance. He did not, as far as we are aware, disassociate himself or his company from them.

The question is whether a man who might commission or buy plays for a company, and perhaps ‘polish’ or adapt them, might have such a proprietorial feeling towards the final text that he might, without any difficulty of conscience, sell it as his own?  That the authorship of this play has not been decided makes it likely it was a co-authored piece, with no single writer having dominance.  As we have seen, a single authorial attribution was becoming important, as publishers were trying to position plays as a form of readable literature.  It is clear from Henslowe’s diary that a play might be written by four of five different writers, working together.  But a publisher didn’t want five names.  They only wanted one.  And in these circumstances, would it not be reasonable for the man who might be termed the commissioning editor, to offer his own?

This is not a unique idea. In our own times, artists such as Damien Hirst – or in an age closer to Shakespeare’s, Leonardo da Vinci – have sold works as their own that were in fact made by a cohort of makers working to the their direction.  In academic publishing, a PhD supervisor (who has done no more than supervise) may get the chief writing credit despite not penning a word.  And as previously mentioned, Hollywood screenwriting credits can be given to the person who originated the idea, or polished the idea, with other writers (who did the donkey work) sometimes getting no credit at all.

Peter Blayney, in his study of the play publishing business, makes the point that plays were not sufficiently profitable for publishers to seek them out.  Plays would have been actively sold to a publisher.[1] The person best placed to do this in the case of a public play was not the author, but the owners of the script; the acting company whose stamp of authorisation is clearly printed on the title page of Thomas Lord Cromwell.

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[1] Peter Blayney, ‘Publication of Playbooks’ in A New History of Early English Drama, eds. Cox and Kastan, p. 392.

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The London Prodigal – ‘Written by William Shakespeare’

In 1605 The London Prodigal was published with a similar, but this time, full authoritative gloss: ‘As it was played by the Kings Majesties Servants.  Written by William Shakespeare’.  Again, the author is unknown and disputed.  The printer, Nathaniel Butter, published King Lear three years later with a similar title page attribution: ‘M. William Shake-speare: his true chronicle history of the life and death of King Lear… By his Majesties servants playing usually at the Globe on the Bank-side.’  There are marked differences between this King Lear and 1623 Folio version, but it is not among those books that scholars refer to as ‘bad quartos’; rather, there is evidence that the later version was revised from the earlier one, and aspects of both are used in most versions of Lear now published.

king lear 1608 butter titlepageButter’s quarto of Lear was badly set by its compositors who, it has been shown, were inept and unused to printing plays;[1] Butter did not use the printer, Nicholas Okes, to print any further publications until 1614.  But the compositors’ errors do not mean this first edition of King Lear was unauthorised.  Shakespeare could not be expected to be involved in overseeing the printing process, beyond handing over the manuscript and trusting the publisher to do their job. Madeleine Doran states ‘there is nothing suspicious in the publication…the entry in the Stationers’ Register would seem to prove that it was printed from an authentic manuscript’.[2]

This entry — in a register that rarely gave more than a book’s title — was unusually elaborate.  Dated 26 November 1607, it reads:

Entered for their copy under the hands of Sir George Buck, knight, and the wardens, a book called Mr. William Shakespeare his history of King Lear, as it was played before the Kings majesty at Whitehall upon St. Stephens night at Christmas last by his majesties servants playing usually at the globe on the Bankside.

london prodigalKing Lear was licensed for printing by the same man who had recorded a conversation with Shakespeare on his copy of George A Green.  The entry in the Stationers’ Register does not say that it was written ‘by William Shakespeare’ rather, it records ownership: the book is called Mr William Shakespeare his history of King Lear’.  How likely is it that Shakespeare was unaware of Butter’s printing of The London Prodigal, a property of his company, published openly as a King’s Men play and claiming to be ‘Written by William Shakespeare’?  If the attribution of The London Prodigal had not been authorised, what would possess him to hand over King Lear to the same man?  Does it not seem more reasonable that both The London Prodigal and King Lear were sold to their publisher by Shakespeare?  If King Lear can be accepted as ‘a play printed with the King’s Men’s blessing’, surely The London Prodigal could be regarded in the same light?

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[1] Much of the information about the first quarto of King Lear, and the quote about the King’s Men’s blessing regarding its publication, were gleaned from King Lear: New Critical Essays, ed. Jeffrey Cahan (Routledge, 2008), p.176-7.

[2] The Text of King Lear by Madeleine Doran, p.123.

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A Yorkshire Tragedy – ‘Written by William Shakespeare’

The next entry in the register relating to Shakespeare is dated 2 May 1608, and records Thomas Pavier’s registration of ‘A book called A Yorkshire Tragedy, written by Wylliam Shakespere’. The play’s title page again links an apocryphal play to both Shakespeare and his company: ‘Acted by his Majesties Players at the Globe. Written by W. Shakspeare’.

yorkshire tragedy shakespeare apocryphaKatherine Duncan-Jones is unusual among Shakespeare scholars in claiming that the play is indeed by Shakespeare.  She is particularly taken with the fact that the phrase ‘marble-hearted’ appears in both this and King Lear. However, though Duncan-Jones found Shakespeare the only writer to use this phrase according to a search of the Chadwyck Healey LION database, a search of the more comprehensive EEBO (Early English Books Online) database reveals it was used earlier by poet Francis Davison in 1602, appeared in the essays of Michel Montaigne (a recognised influence on Shakespeare), and was subsequently widely employed.  Though both Thomas Heywood and George Wilkins have been suggested as authors of the play, the current critical consensus is that the play was by Thomas Middleton.

Henry V Shakespeare 1602 Pavier CreedeThe publisher of A Yorkshire Tragedy, Thomas Pavier, has been much maligned over the last century for his involvement in the publication of what is known as as The False Folio.  Recent scholarship, however, suggests that his behaviour can easily be explained as an assertion of his existing publication rights, and was was not the act of piracy that has been portrayed.  In fact a detailed study of Pavier by Gerald Johnson demonstrates that he was a reputable publisher, who would not knowingly have risked his reputation by an act of piracy.[1]   Pavier had published a genuine Shakespeare play — the third edition of Henry V — in 1602.  This 1602 quarto was openly associated with Shakespeare’s company — ‘As it hath been sundry times played by the Right honourable the Lord Chamberlain his servants’ — but had no author’s name attached.  If attaching the name ‘Shakespeare’ to A Yorkshire Tragedy had a profit motive, why would Pavier not have attached that name to Henry V?   And is it really likely that Pavier would deliberately offend the source of plays that were profitable to him by taking that person’s name in vain?   Is it not a more reasonable explanation that A Yorkshire Tragedy was sold to Pavier as being by William Shakespeare, and that the most reasonable source of his manuscript was the company itself?

CONTINUED>>>

[1] Gerald D. Johnson, ‘Thomas Pavier, Publisher 1600-1625’,  The Library, 6th Series, 14 (1992): 12-48

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The Puritan – ‘Written by W.S.’

Two further plays were published in Shakespeare’s lifetime under his initials.

puritan widow watling street shakespeare apocryphaIn 1607, George Eld — who would print Shake-speare’s Sonnets two years later — published The Puritan, or the Widow of Watling Street as ‘Written by W.S.’  There is no public link to The King’s Men and it is somewhat quieter in its approach, the initials again allowing for a certain deniability.  This might be reasonably explained by the fact that The Puritan is widely accepted as a play by Thomas Middleton, a playwright who would turn twenty-seven that year, and had not yet had a work published under his own name.

revengers tragedy middleton george eldThe publication of a Middleton play by George Eld under false initials presents a puzzle.  George Eld published other Middleton plays but apparently saw no particular need to publish them under someone else’s initials.  In the same year, 1607, Eld published Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy with no author’s name or initials on the title page.  On 7 October 1607, Eld registered Middleton’s A Trick To Catch the Old One, publishing it anonymously the following year. A second edition, printed by Eld for bookseller Thomas Rocket in 1609, bore a title page declaring it was ‘Composed by T.M.’.  Eld printed a third edition in 1616, ‘By T. Middleton’.  In 1608, Eld printed Middleton’s Your Five Gallants for Richard Bonian as ‘Written by T. Middleton’.  There seems to be no reason why George Eld would put false initials on one Middleton play and not on others, unless he was deliberately guided to do so by the person who provided him with the play.

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