Tag: shakespeare

Defensive Anonymity

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

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

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Could Shakespeare Have Been a Front?

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

PLAGIARISM

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

SET HIS NAME TO THEIR VERSES

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

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

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

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

COULD HE BE REFERRING TO SHAKESPEARE?

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

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

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4. ‘Underhand brokery’ – Authors and the Authorities

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

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

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

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

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Newly Augmented and Corrected

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

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

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

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

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The Troublesome Reign of King John – ‘Written by W. Sh’

The Troublesome Reign of King John was first published in 1591 by Sampson Clarke, with no attribution of authorship.

troublesome reign of king johnThe title page stated it was played by Queen Elizabeth’s Men. But in 1611 a new edition was published by John Helme with the addition ‘Written by W. Sh’.  In 1622, Thomas Dewes published a further edition, expanding the attribution to ‘W. Shakespeare’.  A year later, the First Folio included a different King John, The Life and Death of King John, of which Troublesome Reign is acknowledged as a fore-runner and a source.  Writers attributed with the authorship of Troublesome Reign include Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge. Though it belonged to a rival company, it is possible that Troublesome Reign was bought by William Shakespeare and sold to John Helme as being his. Bearing in mind that this play dated from the early 1590s or even 1580s, we should recall that the ‘Poet-Ape’ of Jonson’s poem began his career in play-broking by buying ‘the reversion of old plays’ i.e. plays that were loaned out to another company.  Thus the association with a different company does not rule out Shakespeare’s involvement in this transaction.

The ‘W. Sh’ at least denotes that the attributed author is neither Wentworth Smith nor William Sly. It is possible that John Helme and Thomas Dewes were misled by the title ‘King John’ appearing in a list of plays that Francis Meres attributed to Shakespeare in his Palladis Tamia (1598), and came to believe that this was the same play. But then again, in some sense it was, being a forerunner of Shakespeare’s Life and Death of King John just as The Taming of A Shrew (author unknown) was a forerunner of Shakespeare’s The Taming of The Shrew.

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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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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?

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

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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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