Category: Chapter

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.

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

Posted on by Dr Barber

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.

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

Posted on by Dr Barber

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.

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

Posted on by 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.

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

Posted on by Dr Barber

The Case for Sixteenth Century Doubt of Shakespeare’s Authorship

When the ‘Labeo’ material first came to light, some orthodox scholars accepted it as evidence that Hall and Marston had doubts about Shakespeare’s identity, but concluded they were simply mistaken.  H.N.Gibson, who vigorously defends the traditional attribution of Shakespeare’s works, nevertheless says ‘We may agree that Hall is patting himself on the back because he thinks he has guessed the identity of an author writing under a pseudonym and collaborating with an inferior poet’.

_case-for-shakespeare-end-authorship-question-scott-mccrea-paperback-cover-art-1322141729The more common position now is to deny that Hall and Marston are referring to Shakespeare’s poems.  Scott McCrea in The Case for Shakespeare refutes the idea that the works Hall and Marston are referencing are Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. ‘Probably Hall had Samuel Daniel or Michael Drayton in mind,’ he says, without providing any evidence that their poetry had the specific features which Hall mentions. ‘In any case,’ he asserts ‘it wasn’t the Author [Shakespeare]’.  This is his belief, but he has hardly proved it.  McCrae only deals with those parts of the evidence that are easy to demolish, such as the idea that Marston’s ‘mediocria firma’ is a reference to Francis Bacon.  He entirely ignores the critical passage about the ‘crafty cuttle’ who uses ‘another’s name’.

Other orthodox responses have been as inadequate as McCrea’s. It has been argued that Labeo is Marston himself but this ignores both the specific qualities of the verse identified by Hall, and also the awkward fact that Marston writes about Labeo too (and not in a self-referencing manner).  Others have suggested that Labeo is simply Hall’s term for any bad poet.  But the reference to ‘this bawdy Poggies ghost’ is surely far too specific to stand for an archetype, and Marston put the words of Venus and Adonis directly into Labeo’s mouth.

new place sketch by george vertue 1737The reason why orthodox scholars now deny that Hall and Marston are doubting Shakespeare’s identity (when some once accepted that they were) is because the very existence of sixteenth century doubt about the authorship of works published under the name William Shakespeare legitimises the authorship question. It also raises some significant and difficult questions.  If William Shakespeare was as active and present on the London theatre scene at this time as is generally believed, why would his authorship be doubted?  When Pygmalion and Virgidemiarum were published in 1598, Marston was establishing himself as a playwright and both Marston and Hall could presumably have confirmed the author’s identity for themselves were Shakespeare – as orthodox scholars assume – physically present and well-known on the London literary scene.  What is more, Marston was from Warwickshire, Shakespeare’s home county. Indeed, Marston’s father was appointed counsel to the city of Coventry, and was lawyer to Thomas Green, solicitor to the corporation of Stratford-on-Avon, who has been described by orthodox Shakespearean scholar Dave Kathman as ‘one of Shakespeare’s closest friends in Stratford’. Green, who was a lodger in the Shakespeare household from 1603 to 1611, and who refers in his diary to ‘cousin Shakespeare’, was sponsored to enter the Middle Temple by John Marston and his father in 1595.

John Marston therefore had solid Warwickshire and Stratford-on-Avon connections, and stood surety for ‘one of William Shakespeare’s closest friends’ three years before he published his satirical comment about Labeo. Of course, Kathman’s label for Thomas Green isn’t necessarily correct.  And even if it were true by 1611/2 when Green first used the term ‘cousin’, the term was used somewhat loosely in the era, and we have no idea whether Green knew Shakespeare as early as 1598.  Nevertheless one can’t help feeling that if the talented author of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece was the Stratford man, John Marston would have been well-placed to know. It is no wonder, in the circumstances, that orthodox scholars find it difficult to look closely at this evidence or give the argument more than a dismissive wave of the hand.

THE CASE FOR DOUBT

Collier's_1921_Hog_Wild_BoarLet us summarise the evidence. Hall undoubtedly testifies that he suspects a contemporary author of using a front. The ‘crafty cuttle’ who uses ink as a defensive disguise, who likes to ‘complain of wronged faith or fame’, fame which he may shift onto ‘another’s name’, is surely too explicit a reference to deny. Marston paraphrases two lines from Venus and Adonis and alludes to Hall as a hunter of a famous boar – the poem’s motif. Hall’s critical assessment of Labeo’s poetry has seven points of specific correspondence with Shakespeare’s two poems that no other poet published in the years before 1597 can match:

  1. ‘Heroic poesy’ – both Venus and Lucrece fall into this category.
  2. ‘Big But Ohs’ – both Venus and Lucrece have many lines starting But and Oh.
  3. Hyphenated epithets – common in both Venus and Lucrece.
  4. The poet implores Phoebus/Apollo to guide his enterprise (Venus and Adonis)
  5. The poet steals ‘whole pages’ from Petrarch (The Rape of Lucrece)
  6. The poems are sexual in nature (both Venus and Lucrece)
  7. ‘bawdy Poggies ghost’ – the poems are in Marlowe’s style (both Venus and Lucrece)

We can accept that Hall doubts the authorship of Shakespeare’s earliest published works without accepting that he was correct to do so. Whether Marston doubts Shakespeare’s authorship is less clear, since his reference to a ‘strange… metamorphosis’ is too ambiguous for us to be certain, but he doesn’t challenge Hall’s ‘crafty cuttle’ passage, and says nothing that would link Labeo to William Shakespeare of Stratford, despite being from the same county.

By 1598, when Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image was published, orthodox scholars believe that William Shakespeare was the leading playwright for the Lord Chamberlain’s men, as well as being a shareholder and (at least occasionally) an actor. Most scholars think that by this time Titus Andronicus, all three parts of Henry VI, Richard II, Richard III, The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labours Lost, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and The Merry Wives of Windsor had all been written and staged.  But if the authorship doubts of Marston and Hall are accepted as valid (and I have seen no convincing rebuttal), they surely cast some serious doubt on either Shakespeare’s visibility (in a physical sense) on the London literary scene in 1598, or his ability to convincingly pass as the author of these two narrative poems.

straw-230112_640This is the year in which William Shakespeare bought a load of stone in Stratford in January, and in the same month, was said to be interested in buying some local tithes. His Stratford grain-holding was assessed in February, and in October he was not found in his London lodgings when the taxman called, but that is as much as we can say about his whereabouts.  This is also the year in which he would be listed, eighteen years later, as ‘principle comedian’ in the play Every Man in His Humour; an item of evidence we will assess more fully when we turn our attention properly upon Ben Jonson. The seeming doubt of Hall and the possible doubt of Marston leads to an important question.  Exactly how visible on the London scene was William Shakespeare in the 1590s?

CONTINUE>>>

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

Posted on by Dr Barber

The Original Labeo

A Lawyer?

Baconians argue that the model for Hall’s ‘Labeo’ was Marcus Antistius Labeo, a celebrated Roman lawyer who lost favour with the Emperor Augustine for opposing his views.  This Labeo fits nicely with their candidate because Bacon was a lawyer who lost favour with the Queen.

A Bad Poet?

But a more obvious referent was the Roman poet Attius Labeo, whose Latin translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were so dreadful that his name became a by-word for bad verse.  Hall, after all, urges his Labeo to ‘write better… or write none’.

A Front?

Alexander Waugh has proposed Quintus Fabius Labeo, a Consul of the Roman Republic, who was linked to the African-slave-turned-Roman-playwright Publius Terence.  Terence was regarded, even in his lifetime, as having help from another writer or writers, or even being their ‘front’.  Terence did not deny it.  The prologue to The Adelphi says

… For this,
Which malice tells that certain noble persons
Assist the bard, and write in concert with him,
That which they deem a heavy slander, he
Esteems his greatest praise: that he can please
Those who in war, in peace, as counsellors,
Have rendered you the dearest services,
And ever borne their faculties so meekly.

Though it is often considered that Terence’s plays may have originated with Scipio or Laelius, ancient biographer Santra proposed Quintus Fabius Labeo as one of three more likely sources of Terence’s plays.  The name Labeo therefore potentially references another case of author concealment not unlike Hall’s ‘crafty cuttle’.

Which is it?

The lawyer Labeo can be reasonably discarded, as there is nothing within the text to support it (given we have established that ‘mediocria firma‘ is not a reference to the Bacon family motto). But either of the others (the bad poet, or the concealed author) fit with Hall’s attack on Labeo, and he may have known of both Labeos.  From a sample of currently digitised texts on EEBO, it seems the first (the archetypal bad poet) was better known than the second (proposed by Santra and quoted in Suetonius’s Life of Terence).  I have also seen it argued that the name Labeo is taken from the word ‘Labeon’ which means ‘argumentative’ and ‘blubber-lipped’.  But given the amount of space and energy that Hall expends on attacking Labeo’s works, my money is still with ‘bad poet’.

CONTINUE>>>

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

Posted on by Dr Barber

Bacon and Mediocria Firma

Though Marston is responding to Hall, and they both make references that point to Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, which Hall says was written by Labeo and published ‘under another’s name’, we do not know whether they have the same person in mind when they write about Labeo.  Baconians say that Marston links Labeo to Francis Bacon when, in the Satires that follow Pygmalion’s Image, he uses the Bacon family motto ‘mediocria firma’ when defending those writers whom Hall has attacked. But it is worth looking at this phase in context.   It occurs in a long poem called ‘Reactio’, in which Marston calls Hall a ‘Stinking Scavenger’.  Here is the relevant passage:

Fie, inconsiderate! it grieveth me
An Academic should so senseless be.
Fond Censurer! Why should those mirrors seem
So vile to thee, which better judgements deem
Exquisite then, and in our polish’d times
May run for sensefull tolerable lines?
What, not mediocria firma from thy spite ?
But must thy envious hungry fangs needs light
On Magistrates Mirror? Must thou needs detract
And strive to work his ancient honour’s wrack ?
What, shall not Rosamond or Gaveston
Ope their sweet lips without detraction?
But must our modern Critic’s envious eye
Seem thus to quote some gross deformity?
Where Art, not error, shineth in their style,
But error, and no art, doth thee beguile.
For tell me, Critic, is not Fiction
The soul of Poesy’s invention?

baconmottoThere’s no mention of ‘Labeo’ here, so there’s no reason to link his quoting of the motto to Hall’s attack on Labeo; clearly Hall has been attacking numerous literary works.  But there’s a larger Baconian error here in assuming that use of the phrase mediocria firma is intended to indicate Francis Bacon.  The phrase means ‘mediocrity is safe’ and a search of Early English Books Online demonstrates that it is used by other writers in contexts entirely independent of the Bacon family.  Richard Bancroft, the Bishop of London, for example, used it in a religious treatise published in 1593.  Look again at the passage from Marston and you can see that a far more obvious reading for this line is that he is saying ‘What, mediocrity is not safe from your spite, but your envious hungry fangs must alight upon Magistrate’s Mirror [a highly-regarded anthology of poems, written by several authors]’?

So the supposed link to Francis Bacon is a red herring. But the importance of ‘Labeo’ is undiminished. Who was the original Labeo, whose name Hall appropriated?

CONTINUE>>>

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

Posted on by Dr Barber

Lynceus the Boar-Hunter

Whoever conjured up ‘this bawdy Poggies ghost’, Joseph Hall believed that works of ‘heroic poesy’ with sexual subject matter, full of hyphenated adjectives, where many lines begin with ‘But’ or ‘O’, fronted by a request for guidance from Phoebus/Apollo, and/or mirroring whole pages of Petrarch, were written by someone he calls Labeo, and published under another person’s name. If there are other works of the period that have all of these characteristics, no-one has yet named them.

But if orthodox scholars feel Hall leaves the identification open, John Marston, answering Hall in The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion’s Image and Certain Satires (1598), pinpoints Venus and Adonis as the target of Hall’s criticism, paraphrasing two lines of it in a reference to Labeo:

So Labeo did complain his love was stone,
Obdurate, flinty, so relentless none:
Yet Lynceus knows, that in the end of this,
He wrought as strange a metamorphosis.

The first two lines reference lines 200-1 of Venus and Adonis:

Art thou obdurate, flinty, hard as steel?
Nay more then flint, for stone at rain relenteth

It was common for writers of the period to near-plagiarise each other, as we have seen, so one could argue that this is all Marston is doing.  However, we should not forget Hall’s Labeo has seven points of correspondence with Shakespeare’s two published works, and Marston’s Labeo ‘did complaine his love was stone’ in exactly the same terms that Adonis does in Shakespeare’s poem.

The ‘Lynceus’ of Marston’s poem is commonly thought to be Hall. Lynceus means lynx-eyed.  The original Lynceus was an argonaut who participated in the hunt for the Caledonian boar.  Since the crests of both the Bacon family and the de Vere family contained a wild boar, supporters of the authorship of Sir Francis Bacon and the 17th Earl of Oxford suggest that the choice of the name Lynceus (boar-hunter) for Hall points towards their candidate.  But a wild boar may simply pinpoint the text under debate, since the animal is the source of the culminating tragedy of Venus and Adonis; it is a wild boar that gores Adonis to death.

Since there were other boar-hunting argonauts, why might Marston choose Lynceus in particular?  Lynceus, as well as being a boar-hunter, was the jealous murderer of Castor (twin of Pollux and the brother of Helen of Troy).  In the satirical poems in the same volume Marston says it is Hall’s ‘envious eye’ that leads to him attack other writers.  In other words, it is possible that Lynx-eyed Lynceus was selected not only for the boar-hunting which so usefully ties to the boar motif of Venus and Adonis, but for his murderous envy.

A METAMORPHOSIS

Commentators on Marston’s poem note that Marston is comparing the metamorphosis of Pygmalion to that of Adonis who, after his death, is transformed by Venus into an anemone, a flower whose beauty can be enjoyed only briefly.  I have seen suggestions that it is Labeo’s male lover (a biographical leap if ever there was one), or sharp-eyed observer Lynceus who ‘wrought as strange a metamorphosis’. However the most obvious subject of the sentence is the person first referenced, Labeo himself: it is Labeo who has metamorphosed into Shakespeare; the very thing that ‘Lynceus [Hall] knows’.

Does John Marston know who ‘Labeo’ is?

CONTINUE>>>

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

Posted on by Dr Barber

Shakespeare as Poggies Ghost

Joseph Hall’s ‘Labeo’ is a better fit for Shakespeare than any other writer of the period. Labeo’s poems as we have seen, share strong stylistic qualities with Shakespeare’s two narrative poems (the only works published as Shakespeare’s at the time Hall was writing), and Labeo, like Shakespeare, appealed to Phoebus (Apollo) to help him write, and stole whole pages of text from Petrarch.

The final identifying mark is the sexual nature of these poems: the future bishop urges the author to ‘write cleanly Labeo, or write none’.  The erotic content of Venus and Adonis is considered a key reason why it became a best-seller, and was read to disintegration (only one copy of the first edition survives).  The Rape of Lucrece, though darker and more disturbing, nevertheless has a sexual act at its core. Hall asks:

But who coniur’d this bawdy Poggies ghost,
From out the stews of his lewd home-bred coast:
Or wicked Rablais dronken revellings,
To grace the mis-rule of our Tavernings?
[…]
For shame write cleanly Labeo, or write none.

This section begins with a question about authorship: ‘But who conjured this …’? We have already noted that Hall has accused the author of publishing ‘under another’s name‘; now he is prompting the reader to question who the author might be. ‘Rablais’ is a reference to François Rabelais, a major writer of the French renaissance known for the bawdiness of his tales.  But as far as I can ascertain, there has been little discussion of the phrase ‘Poggies ghost’ in the academic literature or elsewhere.

Zw-acb-MachiavelliThe reference is somewhat obscure.  ‘Poggi’ is Italian for ‘hillock’. There was a Cardinal Giovani Poggio or Poggi, who died in the mid-sixteenth century.  A note by Alexander Groshart in The Complete Poems of Joseph Hall (1879) suggests that ‘Poggi’  refers to The Facetiae  of Poggio Bracciolini, called ‘the most famous jokebook of the Renaissance’; Poggio’s writing style has been described as ‘mildly erotic wit’.[1]  Stylistically, this is another good fit for Venus and Adonis.

A search on Early English Books Online turns up no other references to ‘Poggie’ or ‘Poggy’ but does lead us to two works by Nicholai Machiavelli, an author much read and referenced by writers of the 16th century.  One refers to the whole family Poggi who rebelled against their ruler, Castruccio Castracani.  When Stephano Poggi persuaded them to settle their differences, Castracani at first promised them pardons, saying ‘that he thank’d his stars for giving him such an opportunity of signalizing his clemency’ and then (perhaps predictably) had the whole family (including Stephano Poggi) executed. The second refers to a Giacopo di Poggio: ‘a young man well learned, but ambitious, & delighting in change’ who was  persuaded to join a conspiracy and subsequently executed for his part in it.   Machiavelli’s two examples of rebellious and (unfairly?) executed Poggies seem the most likely Poggies to generate ghosts.

drunkardsBut Hall’s Poggie’s ghost is also bawdy, linked to drunkenness, taverns and stews (neighbourhoods occupied mostly by brothels). The reference to ‘his lewd home-bred coast’ needs unpacking.  Home-bred meant native or indigenous, but around this time, it also came to mean uncultured or unsophisticated, as when Robert Carew in 1602 said ‘Not only the home bred multitude… but even persons of the better calling.’  The original meaning of ‘coast’ was ‘side’, which might refer to the side of the body as much as to the side of the land (the only meaning we still give it). Might it be used here to mean the side of a person, as in ‘his lewd uncultured side’?

ChristopherMarlowe_1856Who might Hall mean by ‘Poggies ghost’?  If we were to select a candidate from any writer of the period, the best fit is surely Christopher Marlowe.  Marlowe was a learned, ambitious and rebellious young man, who was linked by his contemporaries with taverns and unsavoury neighbourhoods.  His contemporary Robert Greene, for example, accused him of frequenting brothels; saying of Marlowe and his friend that ‘too much frequenting the hot house (to use the German proverb) hath sweat out all the greatest part of their wits’.[2]  Two ‘Poggies’ would remind the well-read Elizabethan of Machiavelli, with whom Marlowe is associated: he made Machiavelli a character in The Jew of Malta, having him deliver the prologue.

The Marlovian case for the authorship of the Shakespeare canon centres on Marlowe faking his death in order to escape being (unfairly) executed by the state (as Machiavelli’s Poggies were).  As he was supposed to have been killed in a tavern brawl some four years before the publication of Halls’ Vergidemiarum, one would be hard pressed to find a better fit for ‘this bawdy Poggies ghost’.

faustuswoodcutlargeThe earlier phrase relating to Labeo’s complaining about ‘wronged faith or fame’ is also a good fit for Marlowe who was famously outspoken and was facing charges of atheism and heresy when he was supposedly stabbed in an argument over a bill for food and drink. Hall’s use of the word ‘conjure’ (‘who conjured up this bawdy Poggies ghost’) is also fitting for a man famous for his stage-rendering of the hell-bound magician, Dr Faustus.  Is Hall saying that the author of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece is writing like Marlowe?  If so, he is not alone, for numerous modern scholars have noted the same thing: the editors of the recent Arden edition of Shakespeare’s Poems, for example, describe ‘compelling links’ between Venus and Adonis and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander.[3]  Marlowe, who had also translated Ovid’s Amores, the source of the quote on Venus‘s title page, specialized in epic poetry of a sexual nature.

CONTINUE>>>

[1] Barbara C. Bowen (1988), One hundred Renaissance jokes: an anthology, p. 5.

[2] From the preface of Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1588), it is a reference to the Badestube, the German traditional bathhouse that, since the Middle Ages, was frequently combined with a brothel.  Greene’s jibe that Marlowe and his friend ‘hath sweat out all the greatest part of their wits’ suggests the mercury-vapour steam-baths used to treat syphilis.

[3] Katherine Duncan-Jones & H.R. Woudhuysen (eds), Shakespeare’s Poems (Arden 2007), p21.

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

Posted on by Dr Barber

Shakespeare, Phoebus and Petrarch

Establishing that Joseph Hall was the earliest Shakespeare authorship doubter is underway. The poems he is attacking are heroic in nature, use hyphenated adjectives, and begin many lines with ‘But’ and ‘O’. There are two other distinctive characteristics referred to by Hall which are rarely if ever mentioned by commentators in this debate.

The first is his observation:

Phoebus filled him with intelligence:
He can implore the heathen deities
To guide his bold and busy enterprise.

Shakespeare is by no means alone among Renaissance writers who regularly invoked the names of Greek and Roman deities in his work, having been influenced by the ancient poets at the centre of a humanist Renaissance education. But Venus and Adonis is prominently fronted by a quote from Ovid that very specifically invokes Apollo, also known as Phoebus, asking the ancient god of music, poetry, art, sun, light and knowledge very specifically to ‘guide… his enterprise’:

Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo
Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua.

which Marlowe translated as

Let base conceited wits admire vile things.
Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses’ springs.

The second rarely quoted quality of works by ‘Labeo’ that Hall mentions is that they owe a debt to Petrarch.  Hall observes that the author can ask for Phoebus’s guidance (as Shakespeare does in Venus and Adonis)

Or filch whole pages at a clap for need,
From honest Petrarch, clad in English weed.

Lynne Enterline notes how the post-rape scenes in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece are essentially stolen from Petrarch’s canzone delle metamorphosi.[1]

  • After she is raped, ‘Lucrece shares with Petrarch a keen sense of her want of verbal skill.’  Both Shakespeare and Petrarch ‘represent such self-alienation in language by summoning Ovidian characters (Actaeon and Philomel)’.
  • Shakespeare mirrors Petrarch’s language exactly: where Petrarch expresses alienation from himself as ‘Non son mio, no’ — ‘I am not my own, no’, we are told of Lucrece that ‘She is not her own’.
  • A taboo against speaking provokes the poet of Petrarch’s narrative to call for pen and paper: ‘ond’io gridai con carta et con inconstro’— ‘whence I cried out for paper and ink’.  This sentiment, too, is mirrored exactly by Shakespeare: Lucrece, finding spoken language of no use to her, calls to her maid: ‘Go get me hither paper ink and pen’.

Thus Hall, in his declaration of the two alternative actions that Labeo can take to write verse that (as he admits) reaches the ‘true strains’ of heroic poetry, exactly pinpoints two actions that Shakespeare took in the only works published under that name when Hall was writing; invoking Apollo/Phoebus to guide the writing of Venus and Adonis, and ‘filch[ing] whole pages from Petrarch’ in The Rape of Lucrece.

And there is one more identifying mark from Hall.

CONTINUE>>>

[1] Lynne Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (CUP 2006), p.171-4.

CONTINUE>>>

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

Posted on by Dr Barber

Shakespeare’s But, O, and Hyphenated Adjectives

How can we establish that Hall is referring to Shakespeare’s first two publications? Firstly, there is the number of lines beginning with ‘But’ and ‘Oh’, which Hall mocks: ‘While big But Ohs each stanza can begin’.  A search for these terms in Venus and Adonis furnishes these examples from the first six hundred lines of the poem:

  • But rather famish them amid their plenty, (40)
  • But when her lips were ready for his pay,  (109)
  • ‘O, pity,’ ‘gan she cry, ‘flint-hearted boy! (115)
  • O, be not proud, nor brag not of thy might, (133)
  • But having no defects, why dost abhor me? (158)
  • O, had thy mother borne so hard a mind, (223)
  • But, lo, from forth a copse that neighbors by, (279)
  • But when the heart’s attorney once is mute, (355)
  • O, what a sight it was, wistly to view (363)
  • But now her cheek was pale, and by and by (367)
  • O, what a war of looks was then between them! (375)
  • O, give it me, lest thy hard heart do steel it, (395)
  • But when he saw his love, his youth’s fair fee, (413)
  • But, when his glutton eye so full hath fed, (419)
  • O, learn to love; the lesson is but plain, (427)
  • O, would thou hadst not, or I had no hearing! (448)
  • ‘But, O, what banquet wert thou to the taste, (466)
  • But blessed bankrupt, that by love so thriveth! (487)
  • But hers, which through the crystal tears gave light, (512)
  • ‘O, where am I?’ quoth she, ‘in earth or heaven, (514)
  • But now I lived, and life was death’s annoy; (518)
  • But now I died, and death was lively joy. (519)
  • ‘O, thou didst kill me: kill me once again:  (520)
  • But for thy piteous lips no more had seen. (525)
  • O, never let their crimson liveries wear! (526)
  • But then woos best when most his choice is froward. (591)

The rest of Venus and Adonis continues in the same vein. The Rape of Lucrece exhibits lines beginning ‘But’ or ‘O’ with almost the same frequency.

Secondly there is Shakespeare’s fondness in these poems for hyphenated adjectives, which ‘sweet Philisides’ [Philip Sidney] introduced from France in his Arcadia. Hall mocks this practice:

In Epithets to join two words as one,
Forsooth for Adjectives cannot stand alone.

Turning to The Rape of Lucrece, here are some hyphenated adjectives from the first 600 lines.

  • Lust-breathed Tarquin (55)
  • at such high-proud rate (70)
  • silver-melting dew (75)
  • His high-pitch’d thoughts (92)
  • His all-too-timeless speed (96)
  • still-gazing eyes (135)
  • subtle-shining secrecies (152)
  • with heaved-up hand (162)
  • this poor-rich gain (191)
  • death-boding cries (216
  • brain-sick rude desire (226)
  • still-slaughter’d lust (239)
  • love’s modest snow-white weed (247)
  • an ever-during blame (275)
  • coward-like (282)
  • hot-burning will (298)
  • the self-same (340)
  • Night-wandering weasels (358)
  • fiery-pointed sun (423)
  • holy-thoughted Lucrece (435)
  • snow-white dimpled chin (471)
  • a new-kill’d bird (508)
  • Quick-shifting antics (510)
  • heart-poor citizen (516)
  • never-conquer’d fort (533)
  • dead-killing eye (591)

Again, the poem continues in the same vein. Venus and Adonis indulges in this device with an even higher frequency.

We know that the poems to which Hall is referring, like Venus and Lucrece, were written in heroic style, for he admits that ‘Labeo reaches right: (who can deny?) / The true strains of Heroic Poesy’.

But if all this were not sufficient to identify Shakespeare’s poems as Hall’s target, there are even more specific pointers.

CONTINUE>>>

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

Posted on by Dr Barber

Who is the ‘Crafty Cuttle’?

The argument that Joseph Hall and John Marston were the earliest (sixteenth century) doubters of Shakespeare’s authorship was first developed by the Baconians: those non-Stratfordians who favour Sir Francis Bacon as the true author, or at least the chief co-ordinator, of the works we know as Shakespeare’s. H.N. Gibson, who argued against a range of authorship candidates in his book The Shakespeare Claimants (1964), concluded that B.G.Theobald, who developed this argument, was ‘probably correct in his identification of the poems concerned’ and called the argument ‘the one piece of evidence in the whole Baconian case that demands serious consideration.’

Marston and Hall appear to believe that Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were written under a pseudonym.  Nicknaming this author Labeo, Hall writes in the first satire of Book II of Virgidemiarum:

For shame write better, Labeo, or write none
Or better write, or Labeo write alone.

He seems to think that whatever Labeo has written, he has written it in conjunction with somebody else. He castigates Labeo as someone who ‘abjures his handsome drinking bowl’ because ‘the thirsty swain with his hollow hand’ has ‘conveyed the stream to wet his dry weasand [throat]’.  Here he is referencing the Greek philosopher Diogenes, also known as the Cynic, who had rid himself of all his possessions except his drinking bowl, but cast this off too when he saw a peasant cupping his hands to drink. This is a perfectly workable metaphor on its own for someone who has cast elements of their life aside. But in the context of a possible reference to Venus and Adonis (which will shortly be established), it may refer to the prominent quote from Ovid which fronts that work, relating to the Castalian spring, close to the Oracle at Delphi, where Roman poets went to receive inspiration. Then switching to italics for emphasis, Hall says:

Write they that can, tho they that cannot do:
But who knows that, but they that do not know?

At first sight, ‘they that cannot [write] do’  brings to mind Robert Greene’s ‘he that cannot write true English’ needing to make himself ‘the father of’ plays.  In this case, the second line of the couplet is translated as the secretive (and deniable) nature of the ‘underhand brokery’. But another interpretation is that bad writers write even though they cannot write (well), and being bad writers, don’t have sufficient judgement to know they can’t write.  Hall’s general criticism of Labeo’s poetry suggests this second interpretation is quite likely.

Yet there is a genuine accusation that Labeo is not writing under his own name, but someone else’s.  In the first satire of Book IV, Hall says:

Labeo is whipped, and laughs me in the face:
Why? for I smite and hide the gallèd place.
Gird but the Cynic’s Helmet on his head,
Cares he for Talus, or his flail of lead?
Long 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.

‘Hide’ in the second line doesn’t mean conceal, but ‘thrash’ – another verb to go with ‘whipped’ and ‘smite’.  The reference to the ‘Cynic’s Helmet’ is another reference to Diogenes the Cynic.  It was reported that ‘when asked what he would take to let a man give him a blow on the head, he said “A helmet”’; Labeo is protected from being whipped, and just how he is protected, Hall is about to make plain.  ‘Talus, or his flail of lead’ is a reference to the iron man in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590/1596), who, with a metal flail, ‘threshed out falsehood, and did truth unfold’.[1]  And what follows is Hall’s unfolding of truth.

The cuttlefish is known for defending itself from its enemies by squirting a cloud of black ink.  Labeo, says Hall, ‘lies sure’ in a defensive cloud of black ink.  ‘List’ is used in the archaic sense of ‘likes to, desires to or chooses to’ and Hall says that Labeo, concerned with the issues of ‘wronged faith or fame’ is protecting himself by ‘shift[ing] it on to another’s name.’  Whether or not Labeo is the author Shakespeare, this is undoubtedly another piece of fairly explicit 16th century evidence supporting the idea that using another person’s name was a known practice in this dangerous era (an era when ‘fame’, especially if linked to issues of religious faith, could be deadly).  Though Venus and Lucrece are not identified by name, references to the stylistic elements of both Shakespeare poems in other passages addressed to Labeo make them strong candidates as Hall’s target.

What are these elements? Read on.

CONTINUE>>>

[1] Edmund Spenser, The Fairie Queene, IV, i, 37-44.

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

Posted on by Dr Barber