A Bit of a Rant   Small Press Review, Volume 26, Number 3, March 1994 (Small Magazine Review having become a part of SPR)          Poetry USA, Spring/Summer ’93. Edited by Jack Foley.      4/yr; 56 pp; 2569 Maxwell Avenue,      Oakland CA 94123. $10/year, $4 sample. About a year ago a guest editorial of mine appeared in Small Press Review. It concerned the number of different “schools” of poetry now extant in America, most of them ignored by the commercial and academic establishments, and themselves ignoring (if not inimical to) all rival schools. I started a list of them and invited others to add to it. My hope was to inspire someone eventually to publish an anthology of poetry that contained specimens of all the varieties of poetry currently being composed in this country–but I would have been content merely to have triggered a little discussion. So far, someone from New Zealand has written to say my list should include found poetry (he’s right), and two other people have offered moral support. That’s about it. Dana Gioia, on the other hand, got so many responses to the Atlantic article he wrote a year or two ago on the state of American poetry that he can’t even begin to reply to them, or so he claims. Since Gioia’s appreciation of poetry stops at around 1900, and even his academic knowledge of it is only up to 1960, I conclude from the opposite receptions given our articles even taking into consideration the relatively large circulation of the Atlantic) that the poetry community in America has almost no interest in poetry, or even mere discussion of poetry, that uses techniques not common by the fifties or earlier. More recently, I sounded out the editors of Writer’s Digest on an article I wanted to write on otherstream poetry zines as a break-in market for poets not writing formal poetry or conventional free-verse (this latter representing “non-traditional” poetry for Writer’s Digest).  I told them I thought my piece would augment the “otherwise excellent article on poetry markets” that’d been in their magazine a few months before. (Yeah, I have my moments of hypocrisy, too.) That they turned me down didn’t bother me. But I was annoyed by their claim that the kinds of non-traditional poetry I thought they’d neglected “actually . . . were considered” in their article. Of course, no one expects the people in charge of Writer’s Digest to know anything about poetry, or any other form of writing, but it’d be nice if they were a little less smugly certain of their omniscience. Despite these two grave setbacks for the cause of Otherstream Poetry, however, all is not lost, for there is, I am happy to report, an American magazine reaching more than a few dozen readers that is covering just about the ENTIRE poetry spectrum: Poetry USA. The latest issue, which is devoted to “the experimental issue,” contains not only infra-verbal, visual, and mathematical poetry (though no found poetry) but knownstream free-verse, rhymed verse and all kinds of other mixtures and who-knows-whats. There are fine illustrations and collages scattered through it, too, and a group of excerpts from a taped dinner conversation Robert Duncan had with Norman and Virginia Goldstein in 1970. Duncan’s remarks are all decidedly New Age and off-the-wall but often nonetheless insightful and invigorating, not so much about poetry as about being a poet.Rounding out the issue are a number of pertinent quotations on poetics from people like Whitman, Stein, Olson and Gioia (!) and letters-to-the-editor that include a report from Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino about his efforts to smuggle an issue of his unconventional art zine into the recent Whitney Museum Biennial, which was supposed to be devoted to “alternative” art but, although it included magazines, for some reason ignored . . . experioddica. Among the too-numerous-to-mention-them-all high points of the issue is Michael Basinski’s 4-part “Odalisque” series. In each frame of this a ring of words and near-words surrounds a giant O. The near-word at the top of “Odalisque No. 1″ nicely emonstrates what an infra-verbal technique can accomplish. The near-word is “rammar,” the infra-verbal technique simple defacement, the result a sudden “disconcealment” of a secret (and, to me, strangely enchanting) symmetry, which rattles the reader into full engagement with “grammar,” “ram,” “mar,” and “mirror”–as sounds AND signs, by themselves AND intermingled. In “Odalisqu No. 4,” Basinski circles his O with twenty words containing a v–or V. What makes this interesting is that many of these words wouldn’t normally have a v in them–“vords,” for instance. This would undoubtledly seem a silly game to Gioia, Writer’s Digest, and those who read them, but for me it was (yes) thrilling to experience a “down” sharpened to “dovn,” a “water” turned Germanic and fatherly as “vater,” and such unmodified words as “wives” and “aggressive” as suddenly alien objects, speared into. Or, best of all, to find between “wildevness” and “festival,” and opposite “wives,” the wonderfully expanded “luVst.” Basinski also contributes a version of “The Tell-Tale Heart” that lists all of Poe’s words in alphabetical order. This, for me, yields nothing less than the subconscious mind of the story, eerily achieving a narrative interest in its own right as it blends or clashes with what Poe wrote–as in the following passage: “shriek shriek shrieked shrieked shutters silence silence simple since since single single singylarity sleep slept slept slight slight slipped…” or “how how however human” followed by 120 instances of “I.” I was also impressed by the issue’s many excerpts from Jake Berry’s visio-mathematico meta-scientific master-poem, “Brambu Drezi”–and the excellent introduction to it that Jack Foley, the editor-in-chief of Poetry USA, provides. Strong long poems by Ivan Arguelles and Michael McClure are in the issue, as well. How sad that slickzines like the Atlantic and Writer’s Digest will no doubt continue forever to ignore publications like Poetry USA.

Greenes Groatsworth of Wit

Greenes Groatsworth of Wit (1592) was said to have been written by Robert Greene, but some scholars believe it to have been written in part or entirely by Henry Chettle posing as Greene—and writing from what he expected his readers to take as Greene’s point of view. It does not matter to my argument here who it was that wrote the Groatsworth, though, because my argument is not that Greene identified the actor Shakespeare as the playwright Shakespeare in it, but that someone in 1593 did so.

For our purposes, the key passage in the Groatsworth letter is the
following, two or three paragraphs into it “. . . Base minded men al
three of you, if by my miserie ye be not warned : for unto none of you
(like me) sought those burres to cleave : those Puppits (I meane) that
speake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange that I, to whom they al have beene beholding : is it not like that you, to whome they all have beene beholding, shall (were ye in that case that I am now) be both at once of them forsaken? Yes trust them not : for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you : and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie.O that I might intreate your rare wits to be imployed in more profitable courses: & let those Apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions. I know the best husband of you all will never prove an Usurer, and the kindest of them / all will never proove a kinde nurse : yet whilst you may, seeke you better Maisters; for it is pittie men of such rare wits, should be subject to the pleasures of such rude groomes.”

The first commentators on this passage assumed that “Shake-scene”
was Shakespeare, the known author of the line “O tygers heart wrapt in a Womans hyde,” which is parodied in the passage. It seemed obvious to them that the letter’s author was contemptuous of Shakespeare, a lowly actor, for taking up the writing of plays, something only university men were qualified to do. Some early commentators suspected a possible accusation of plagiary, too, because of the reference to the Crow’s being “beautified with our feathers.” But the Crow remained Shakespeare for them—and a playwright, if not necessarily a very ethical one. Once the Shakespere-rejectors came on the scene, though, everything changed. They could not concede that the Crow was intended to be Shakespeare, for—if true—it would pretty much scuttle the candidacy of Oxford, Marlowe, Bacon and most of the others put forward as The True Author. Oxford, for instance, almost certainly did not act on the public stage, nor would the Groatsworth narrator likely have dared insult a man of the highest rank like Oxford the way he insulted the Crow. Marlowe was not known to have acted, either. Worse for his candidacy, the Groatsworth-narrator treats him and the Crow as two different persons. Nor was Bacon an actor.

Hence, the Shakespere-rejectors have left hardly a word of the key
passage of the Groatsworth letter uncontaminated with possible
secondary meanings that deflect the passage’s meaning every which
way but sane. Even some Stratfordians have found idiosyncratic ways
to re-interpret the passage. Nonetheless, I continue to believe that the traditional reading, which I will be terming, “the Established Reading,” is, if not beyond reasonable doubt the only sound one, by far the most sound one.

The key to the passage, for the Established Reading, is the “tygers heart wrapt in a Players hyde” line, so I’ll begin with that. It is unquestionably a quotation , for the font used for it (changed above to italic) differs from the font used for the main text, and is used elsewhere in the Groatsworth for quotations, proper names, and foreign words and phrases. It is also pretty certainly a slightly altered line written by William Shakespeare, for the only work in which it appears whose author’s name is attached is Shakespeare’s 3 Henry VI, in the First Folio. And we are near-certain that versions of that play had been performed before 1592 (because, among other reasons, of Nashe’s 1592 reference to the great crowds being drawn by a play featuring Talbot, the hero of 1 Henry VI, which most scholars believe was written about the same time as 3 Henry VI, and Marlowe’s apparent knowledge by 1592 of Richard III, which scholars think would have been written after 3 Henry VI).

Against the proposition that William Shakespeare’s having written the line parodied makes him the Crow, numerous anti-Stratfordians have argued that the Crow could be a mere actor whose line that is because his is the part in which that line appears, not because he wrote it.  But the letter clearly states that it is with this line that the Crow believes himself equal to the best of Greene’s acquaintances (Marlowe, Nashe and Peele) at “bombasting out a blank verse.” Since these three are all playwrights who are not known to have acted, the only way the Crow could have used the line to compete with them is as a writer. QED?

No, because the Crow could have been an actor who improvised the tygers hart line and thought it the equal of anything Marlowe, Nashe or Peele could write. But the line is documented as Shakespeare’s (and rather more likely to have been Shakespeare’s considering its quality than that of some actor not known as a playwright). Moreover, the Crow as an actor improvising lines does not fit the context of the poaragraph as a whole.

To see why, let’s consider the over-all purpose of the paragraph for its author. Surely, it is to warn his three play-making acquaintances that if any of them is “in that case that (he) is now,” the actors will forsake him as they are now forsaking the author. Now, we know from other sections of his letter that Greene, the author, is at his “last end” and left “desolate,” and “perishes now for want of comfort,” or claiming to be.

We also know that want was a chronic state with the real Greene and
food, medicine and a roof over his head the only likely comfort that the Greene of the letter could be in want of in such a situation. So, the players are almost certainly forsaking him by not giving him money for those items. This, it stands to reason, they are doing in one, or a
combination, of the following ways: (1) by turning down a play of his
they don’t like; (2) by refusing him an advance on a play he has
proposed to write for them; (3) by refusing to give him extra money for
some play he’d already sold them; (4) by refusing to find him some
literary job like fixing a scene he could make a little cash from.
According to the author, they will do the same to Marlowe, Nashe or
Peele if he is ever in Greene’s dire straits. To establish this as strongly as he can, the letter’s author presents three closely related arguments, saying:

(1.)    They have forsaken me; therefore, they will forsake you. (“Is it not strange that I, to whom they al have beene beholding : is it not like that you, to whome they all have beene beholding, shall [were ye in that case that I am now] be both at once of them forsaken?”)

(2.)    They held me in higher esteem than they hold you but nonetheless are forsaking me; therefore, they are even more likely to forsake you. (“if by my miserie ye be not warned : for unto none of you (like me) sought those burres to cleave . . .”)

(3.)    With one of them writing material he thinks as good as yours,        they have all the less reason to feel they have to treat you kindly; that is, if one of you ends up in my situation, the actors’ having a highly confident in-house playwright, with at least one hit to his credit, will keep them from feeling dependent enough on you to bail you out—even if the Crow is not a harbinger of a day when actors will get all their material from actor/play-makers. (“Yes trust them not : for there is an upstart Crow [who] supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse [or make plays] as the best of you . . .”) Can anyone believe the Groatsworth-author would climax a deathbed warning with, “Trust actors not, for one of them is now hamming up one of your lines,” or even, “Trust actors not, for one of them is now adding one of his own lines to one of your plays?” How would an actor’s hamming it up or padding his part demonstrate significant treachery? How could such trivial misdeeds devastatingly make the Groatsworth author’s point that the actors will forsake any of Greene’s friends (but wait to do so till he is dying?!), especially financially?

Have I now made my case? Not entirely, for—as some including non-anti-Stratfordian Gary Kosinsky and Oxfordian Mark Alexander have argued—the line could have been quoted only to describe the Crow as having a tygers hart. But why would the Groatsworth-narrator describe the Crow with a line of blank verse, then speak derisively of the Crow’s thinking he can work up blank verse as well as anyone in a locution that certainly makes it sound like the line is being used as an example of the kind of blank verse the Crow is responsible for? Could the Groatsworth-narrator have been unaware of how the line sounded, and left it that way if he truly didn’t intend it to have its most obvious meaning? Surely if he wanted only to characterize the Crow as being cruel-hearted, he would have written something along the lines of, “There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, and possessing a tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, who supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you.” That tells the reader the Crow has a tygers hart without making the reader wrongly think that the tygers hart line is the Crow’s.

Worse, what would having the cruel heart of a tiger, but not the tyger’s heart line, have to do with being conceited, improvising lines, or whatever else the Crow is to be considered guilty of doing? As description, the line is a digression; as a sample of the Crow’s abilities, it makes an important point (with a gratuitous, not-too-relevant insult thrown in). In short, the passage works best, by far, if we consider the tygers heart line not only to describe the Crow but to represent the kind of line he thinks makes him able to compete with the best playwrights around.  Wait, though. This interpretation would mean that the Groatsworth-narrator, who is obviously contemptuous of the Crow, was belittling the Crow for thinking his tygers hart line was a good one! Alexander (and others) want to know how the Groatsworth-narrator could plausibly have thought that. The line “conveys dignity, beauty, and power,” says Alexander at his website. “It shows a command of language and imagery. Greene (or Greene’s stand-in, I’m sure Alexander would agree) could not have been ignorant of these facts.” Ergo, if Greene or whoever wrote the Groatsworth considered the Crow to have written the tyger’s heart line, he would not have sneered at him for presuming on the basis of it to be first-rate at making up blank verse (as either an improvising actor or as a playwright). But who is Alexander to tell us what the author of the Groatsworth may have thought or said of the line, particularly if the author deemed the line’s originator a detestable, uneducated actor?

Unless . . . ? What about the possibility that the Groatsworth-narrator considered the tiger’s heart line a plagiary? In general, those who consider the Crow a plagiarist quote only the Groatsworth’s reference to the Crow as “beautified with our feathers,” neglecting to quote its
comparisons of actors to “Puppits” whom playwrights supply with words, and “Anticks” dependent, like the Crow, on others for their color, which pretty decidedly indicate that the feathers figure is merely one more jibe at the Crow’s station in life as a petty actor, dependent on his betters for whatever success he has, not an attempt to expose him as a plagiarist.

Eager to latch onto this way of denigrating the Crow, whom she accepts as Shakespeare of Stratford but not as The Author, Diana Price goes outside the Groatsworth to a little-known pamphlet called Vertues Common-wealth (1603), by a writer named Henry Crosse that scholars seem not to know much of anything about, even whether he was a real erson or not. Price seems to think his work is evidence that Shakespeare was a plagiarist, but no playwright. To back her claim, she provides the following strongly Groatsworth-influenced quotation from Crosse:

“He that can but bombast out a blank verse, and make both the ends jump together in a rhyme, is forthwith a poet laureate, challenging the garland of bays, and in one slavering discourse or other, hang out the badge of his folly. Oh how weak and shallow much of their poetry is, for having no sooner laid the subject and ground of their matter, and in the Exordium moved attention, but over a verse or two run upon rocks and shelves, carrying their readers into a maze, now up, then down, one verse shorter than another by a foot, like an unskillful Pilot, never comes night the intended harbor: in so much that oftentimes they stick so fast in mud, they lose their wits ere they can get out, either like Chirillus, writing verse not worth the reading, or Battillus, arrogating to themselves, the well deserving labors of other ingenious spirits. Far from the decorum of Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, etc., or our honorable modern Poets, who are no whit to be touched with this, but reverent esteemed, and liberally rewarded.”

According to Price, “a ‘Battillus’ was an agent for writers who did not wish to see their own names in print.” That, plus the reference by Crosse to “He that can bombast out a blank verse” makes Shakespeare, the Crow, a front for some unknown noble. The main problem with this, aside from the fact that there is little reason to assume that the Groatsworth author’s use of “bombast out a blank verse” to describe Shakespeare means that anyone using that phrase again must also be referring to Shakespeare, is that Crosse clearly describes the bombaster, as had the Groatsworth-narrator, as a poet. Crosse’s “Battillus” is no front, either (nor was the original Battillus, a medicore poet said to have stolen lines from Virgil, not acted as a front), but a poet stealing from others. Moreover, Crosse is not describing a single poet but a class of incompetent poets who over-rate themselves. Their work fails to scan and is muddled–where is the work by anyone named Shakespeare that does that more than rarely?

Price provides a strained reading of Jonson’s hostile poem, “On Poet-
Ape,” to show that Crosse was not the only one of his times making
veiled references to Shakespeare’s plagiary. (Funny how quick
Shakespeare-rejectors are to accept documents unfavorably describing
someone as applying to Shakespeare, even when their subject is left
unnamed, but won’t go near one that favorably describes him by
name.) But the poem is much too general to more than guess who
Jonson was aiming at. Besides, Jonson referred to the only
Shakespeare associated with the river Avon who was known to have
been a friend of Heminges and Condell in terms of the warmest
friendship. At any rate, the poem ends, “Fool, as if half eyes will not
know a fleece/ From locks of wool, or shreds from a whole piece,”
which—again—makes the plagiarist a writer, however unoriginal, for
he is using shreds of others’ work, not whole works. The Crow would
remain a playwright, which is all I’m trying to show.

There is better possible confirmation of the Crow-as-plagiarist thesis when, later in the letter, the Groatsworth-narrator begs his friends to boycott the actors, “and let those Apes imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your admired inventions.” This doesn’t hold up for me. The word “imitate” here almost certainly means simply “make a representation of, reproduce,” not plagiarize, for it is applied to actors, and actors (and apes) are trivial averbal mimicks, not plagiarists. More important, if the Groatsworth-narrator wanted to accuse the Crow of plagiarizing, why would he not have done so directly; and why would he not have accused him alone, rather than “those Apes,” not all of whom could have been plagiarizing him?

One answer to this, suggested by Oxfordian Jerry Downs, is that the Groatsworth-narrator wanted to avoid a libel suit. Hence, he not only did not name the Crow, but made his libel general rather than specific.  But he already hadn’t named the Crow, so would have been fairly safe from that risk. Moreover, that he accused one of the playwrights he addressed of atheism in another part of his letter I’ll later touch on indicates that fear of (much less drastically) libeling the Crow, a mere player, could not likely have been a pressing motive of his.  Even if we accept the Groatsworth-narrator to have been accusing the Crow of plagiary, he can’t have thought he’d stolen the tygers heart line, for that is his, the Crow’s, line, not someone else’s.  Moreover, the Crow deems it evidence he can equal the best of Greene’s friends in fashioning (bumbasting out) blank verse lines. It’s not likely in such a case that the Crow would think that the line wasn’t his own work.

No further discussion would be necessary if it weren’t that an Oxfordian named Jonathon Dixon has found a meaning in the Oxford English Dictionary for “suppose” that was in use in Shakespeare’s time: “pretend.” This, according to Jerry Downs, “clearly enables a different reading from the modern tradition — Trust them not; because
there is an upstart player who pretends he is able to write blank verse
with the best of you.” The player could be Shakespeare (and Downs
accepts that he was). Of course, the passage would really be saying,
“Trust them not, because there is an upstart player who, with his tygers hart, pretends he is able to write blank verse with the best of you.”  How having a tygers hart has any more to do with pretending to be a writer than it would have with bragging, and/or hamming up and/or padding a part beats me.

Nor can I make sense of a reasonably good writer like whoever wrote the Groatsworth’s not writing straight out, “There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his stolen tygers hart wrapt in a players hyde, pretends he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you.” Why use “supposes” if the Groatsworth-narrator wanted the word to mean “pretends?” The OED has over a dozen entries for “suppose” that all define it as “take as true” or “believe” or the like, and only one entry, the thirteenth, defining it as  pretend.” “Pretend” is also an obsolete meaning of the word, which suggests it was never a very popular one. No one, including Downs, has come up with an instance of an Elizabethan writer’s using “suppose” to mean “pretend.” Shakespeare, for instance, never used it that way.

Moreover, the Dixon reading makes the passage less rhetorically sophisticated than the Established Reading when we consider the relation of the Crow’s “supposing” himself a fine writer of blank verse to his later being “in his conceit” a terrific “Shake-scene.” Taking
“supposes” to mean “pretends,” we have an accusation of the Crow as (a), devious, and (b), conceited, whereas taking it to mean “believes to be the case,” we have the Crow as (a), conceited in one way, and (b), conceited in a second related way, to result in a fairly neat parallelism.

The problem of Greene, or someone acting as Greene, climaxing a rant against actors who have forsaken a dying man with a description of an actor doing something trivially dishonest and/or foolish (like pretending to be a writer of some sort) remains, as well. What it comes down to, finally, is that my common sense, straightforward reading of the passage, using “supposes” as “takes as true,” its normal meaning then and now, is unproblematic and makes perfect sense in the context: the Crow’s line about the tygers hart makes him think himself a great writer. It fits in well with all the other evidence, hard evidence, that the documented author of the line, Shakespeare, was an actor, too. The Dixon/Downs reading, on the other hand, teems with problems and fits only awkwardly in with a speculative authorship theory unsupported by any kind of hard evidence.

To solidify the identification of the Crow as Shakespeare, the documented author of the tygers hart line—indeed, almost to prove it by itself—is the Groatsworth-narrator’s mocking the Crow with the descriptive noun, “Shake-scene,” an obvious pun on “Shakespeare.”  Those Shakespeare-rejectors anxious to keep the Crow and Shakespeare separate can only protest that this term was used by chance, meant no more than “wonderfully exciting actor” or the like, and had nothing to do with Shakespeare. But there is no evidence that it was a term in general use circa 1593 and therefore likely to have been used by chance. There is no evidence, in fact, that anyone ever used it but the Groatsworth-narrator, this once—until Shakespearean scholars began quoting the Groatsworth over a hundred years later. In fact, the awkwardness of the word, “Shake-scene,” is further evidence that the Groatsworth-narrator did not use it merely to mean “wonderful actor,” with no intention of using it to allude to Shakespeare, as some have argued. Why? Because the Groatsworth-narrator had other much less awkward words for “wonderful actor” at his disposal (e.g.., “Roscius,” the name of an actor famed in antiquity) if all he wanted to do was suggest the conceit of the Crow as an actor. Why use a nonce-word like “Shake-scene” whose meaning is so unclear instead?

Furthermore, puns on people’s names were common then. Greene himself referred in an earlier pamphlet to Marlowe as “Merlin” (and if Greene didn’t write the letter to three playwrights, whoever did would certainly have wanted to sound like Greene). In short, “Shake-scene” had to be the Groatsworth-narrator’s way of emphasizing that the Crow was Shakespeare.

Other Candidates for the Role of the Crow

The only remaining obstacle my case must face is the possibility that an equally plausible case can be made for some other literary or theatrical figure of the time’s being the Crow. Needless to say, the Shakespeare-rejectors have put forward more than a few other candidates for the role. Only four of them, however, are not ridiculously unlikely. One—advanced by Oxfordian Winifred Frazer—is Will Kempe. He was multi-talented as an actor, clown, acrobat, musician, dancer, and even author—a regular Johannes fac totum (Jack of all trades). Frazer notes that in 1588 Kemp succeeded Richard Tarlton as the lead in a play called The Crow Sits Upon The Wall, which was popular enough to be published in 1592, a little before the Groatsworth came out. That would make Kemp, taking over a role formerly played by a famous actor, a sort of “upstart Crow.” Moreover, he was known to extemporize lines to “improve” his parts. But there is no record (I know of) of any play he was said to have authored, much less anything
that would have aroused the deathbed jealousy of Greene (as actual person or fictional character), and one would be hard-pressed to find a way to connect him in any way to the tiger’s heart line. Nor does the “Shake-scene” pun work for him. In short, he lacked the occupation, reputation and name to be the Crow.

A second candidate is the actor Edward Alleyn, whom Oxfordian Stephanie Hughes puts forward, following A. D. Wraight, an advocate of Christopher Marlowe as the Bard. Hughes, like Wraight, claims that the Groatsworth is a coherent whole, and that the writer of the letter
should be taken as the character Roberto, the hero of the principal story in the Groatsworth, and the Crow as the actor in that story who talks Roberto into becoming a playwright (identified rather tenuously as Alleyn). Somehow all this leads to Alleyn (a sometime money-lender), as the Crow, refusing to lend Greene money.

But there is no warrant for taking the Groatsworth as a coherent whole. The pamphlet clearly consists, in order, of (1) the tale of Roberto in the third-person; (2) the letter to three playwrights in the first-person; (3) a version of the ant and grasshopper fable in the third-person; and (4) a letter,supposedly by Greene, to his wife in the first person. The four are not narratively-interconnected (except for such pedestrian transitional passages between them as the one between the first letter and the fable: “Now to all men I bid farewel in like sort, with this conceited Fable of that olde Comedian Aesop”) although the first three are thematically related, all having to do with repentance, poverty, and the importance of living a virtuous life, and the fourth is similarly from its author’s deathbed. In short, the pamphlet seems clearly a collection of miscellaneous texts such as Greene, when he died, might have left (separately or “organized” by an editor) in the possession of a bookseller (as Chettle, the editor of the Groatsworth) says happened).

As for the Player in the Roberto story, he lives in a storyland (however rooted parts of it may be in Greene’s life), the Crow in what’s really happening now. The two have nothing in common except main occupation (and the fact that both are characterized as boastful, although the Player in the Roberto story is less bitterly attacked for it).

And they differ from one another significantly. For one thing, the Player, who appears in Roberto’s adventures only briefly, does not mistreat Roberto; indeed, he befriends him by giving him a way to earn much-needed money. The Crow, on the other hand, is one of the actors forsaking Greene, and instrumental in making it difficult for Greene to procure much-needed money. And while the Player used to write plays but no longer does, the Crow is an upstart in the field, which suggests he is only now beginning his career as a writer of plays. Moreover, if the Groatsworth-narrator wanted us to take the Crow as the Player, he need only have continued his Roberto story for a page or two more, and told of Roberto’s last days, and had him warn his play-writing friends.  As the Groatsworth-narrator did that, he could have brought back the Player, and insulted him as the Crow. For all these reasons, it seems to me unnecessary to go outside the letter to three playwrights for help in determining the identity of the Crow.

As for the Wraight idea that the Groatsworth-narrator’s central concern in the upstart Crow passage is usury, and that he was somehow accusing the Crow of betraying him as a usurer—refusing to give him a loan, I take it—there is nothing whatever in the one line concerned with the Crow to indicate that usury is on the author’s mind at that point.

The subject comes up only once in the letter, when the author writes “I know the best husband of you all will never prove an Usurer, and the kindest of them / all will never proove a kinde nurse.” So far as I know, no advocate of the usury charge, which includes Unknown-
Aristocratian Diana Price (who takes the Crow as Shakespeare, not Alleyne, but wants him a usurer, not a playwright), has made any attempt to show why the author is not obviously merely making a comparison; certainly, none ever says why the actors’ being usurers (and it is actors, plural, who are usurers, not just the Crow) does not by the same reasoning make Marlowe, Peele and Nashe nurses. But Price goes back to Vertue’s Common-wealth in an attempt to support her claim, quoting the following passages (plagiarized from the
Groatsworth):

. . . these copper-lace gentlemen [who] grow rich, purchase lands by adulterous plays, and not [a] few of them usurers and extortioners which they exhaust out of the purses of their haunters so they are puffed up in such pride as self-love as they envy their equals and scorn their inferiors.

. . . it were further to be wished, that those admired wits of this age, Tragedians, and Comedians, that garnish Theaters with their inventions, would spend their wits in more profitable studies, and leave off to maintain those Anticks, and Puppets, that speak out of their mouths: for it is pity such noble gifts, should be so basely employed, as to prostitute their ingenious labors to enrich such buckram gentlemen.

Price splices the two passages together to claim that the “copper-lace gentlemen” of the first one, some of whom are described as usurers, are the same as the “Anticks, and Puppets” of the second; that makes actors in general, and the Crow in particular, usurers. But why should one can take a plagiarized passage published eleven years after the Groatsworth as reliable evidence of much of anything? Who could know to whom Crosse may have been referring, if to anyone?

Furthermore, it is clear that the second passage is referring to all actors, and all actors cannot be reasonably thought the same as the “copper-lace gentlemen” who deal in the “adulterous” plays of the first passage, which had to include non-actors (and, literary history tells us, most certainly did), just as the class, actors of 1603, could not have included no one but “copper-laced gentlemen.” It is ever-so-slightly possible that Crosse did, sloppily, think of some actors as dealers in plays, which would mean he may have also considered those actors who dealt in adulterous plays among those dealers in adulterous plays who were also usurers and extortioners. But it’s a stretch, and even if some actors were usurers and dealers in plays, it does not follow that the Groatsworth-narrator said the Crow was. There remains nothing in the single line in the Groatsworth directly about the Crow that has anything to do with his being a usurer or play-dealer (or extortioner).

Aside from all that, there is no evidence, to get back to Alleyn, that he wrote the “tyger’s heart” line, nor is there much evidence that Alleyn ever wrote plays, as I have established that the Crow did, and might consequently have endangered the livelihood of the Groatsworth
author—just the following entry in Philip Henslowe’s account-book:

“pd vnto my sonne E Alleyn at the Apoyntment of the company…for his Boocke of tambercam the 2 of octob(er) 1602 the some of xxxx (shillings).”

But we know that Alleyn bought many plays by others, making them “his,” because there is a 1589 deed of sale documenting his purchase of theatrical paraphernalia, including “play books.” Moreover, according to W.W. Greg, in his The Henslowe Papers (p.151), “Tamar Cam originally belonged to Strange’s men, and the second part was performed by them as a new play 28 Apr. 1592.” This Greg believes “was written as a rival to Tamburlain, which belonged to the Admiral’s men. Tamar Cam appears, however, to have belonged not to the company, but to Alleyn, and he brought it with him when he rejoined the Admiral’s men, probably in 1594. These revived it as a new play, acting the first part 6 May and the second 11 June 1596.

Finally, 2 Oct 1602, the company bought the “Boocke” of Alleyn for £2. This was the usual payment for an old play, and therefore probably included only Pt. I, though this is not specified.” Greg goes on to speak of a “…revival for which doubtless the company purchased the “Boocke” in 1602″. This sounds awfully like Alleyn owned the rights to the play as opposed to wrote it. If he had written a play formidable enough to arouse the Groatsworth-narrator’s jealous contempt in the early 1590’s, one would expect him to have written others—one of
which ought to be extant. None is. On top of all that, the Shake-scene pun does not apply to him which, for me, is enough by itself to rule him out.

The third of the four top candidates is, of all people, Ben Jonson.  Oxfordian Nina Green points out that in 1592, “Jonson, at 20, was in all likelihood an actor with burgeoning aspirations as a writer. His arrogance, his own considerable opinion of his talents, and his lack of charity toward other writers are amply attested to in his own words as recorded by William Drummond of Hawthornden. Drummond also commented on the excessive fondness for drink which could well have made Jonson one of the fairweather tavern companions of whom the
Groatsworth-narrator complains.

Finally, and most importantly, the first syllable of Jonson’s surname corresponds to the Latin form Johannes.” But many of Jonson’s feuds have been reported to us, and there’s no indication in the records that he so much as knew Greene in 1592. Certainly he never fired off any comeback to anything Greene supposedly said about him, as he did to other attacks on him. He also had nothing to do with the tiger’s heart line, that we know of—and Jonson surely seems the type who would have taken credit for so good a line had it been his. Besides, if he had been responsible for the tiger’s heart line in 1592 or earlier, and for the play it was in, his having taken so long to become a well-regarded playwright would be hard to account for. Nor is his candidacy helped any more than Alleyn’s or Kempe’s by the reference to a “Shake-scene.” There thus seems little reason to accept him as the Crow.

Then, there is Oxford, in his guise as actor/playwright, Will Shakespeare. I shouldn’t have called him not ridiculously unlikely to have been the Crow. First of all, how could the Groatsworth-narrator, a commoner, have addressed him so contemptuously if he were? More
to the point, how could the Groatsworth-narrator have viewed a man near 40 of Oxford’s educational background and family (which included an uncle who was a well-known author), with a fair amount of lyric poetry and, presumably, quite a few plays behind him, as an
“upstart” of any kind?

I should insert here that some Oxfordians point to the Groatsworth-narrator’s use of the word “upstart” to refute Shakespeare’s being the Crow for one of the reasons I consider it to refute Oxford’s having been the Crow: that by 1591 or 1592, when the Groatsworth would have been written, Shakespeare would have been already prominent in London theatre—and therefore not an upstart. But Shakespeare was not all that prominent by then. No work had yet been published under his name, and only one of the Henry VI plays of all that he eventually wrote (if that) had been mentioned in any records by then (that we have). Nor does Shakespeare himself show up as an actor or writer in any of the documents to that date that have come down to us. Most scholars believe he had written only five or six plays by then, and it is likely that they had been put on with no author’s name attached to them. Some may even have been collaborations. It seems near-certain that Shakespeare in 1592 was just coming into his own as a playwright after several years of obscurity as a minor actor, during which he was probably also for a time a play-doctor, then apprentice playwright.

There is no reason to think the Groatsworth-narrator would have known much, if anything, about him until the early nineties when the sudden great success of 1 Henry VI began to make his name. Finally, the adjective, “upstart,” occurs in a sentence that goes on not to speak of such ways of being an upstart as having recently gained wealth or status but only of having begun writing blank verse. In any case, the Groatsworth-narrator’s use of the word, “upstart,” is more a point in favor of Shakespeare’s being the Crow than anyone else’s since it is much more likely that Greene, a double M.A. professional playwright, or someone writing out of that persona, would have described a mere actor, with no university background, whom he has just become aware of as a rival author, with the adjective, “upstart,” than he would anyone else then on the scene, particularly a noble coming from a literary family who had been writing poetry for over a decade—and possibly plays, too. Or someone like Edward Alleyn who had become a manager of, and virtual heir apparent to, a highly lucrative theatrical business—but remained a mere actor.

As for Oxford, to get back to him, perhaps the biggest thing against his having been the Crow is (as I’ve previously written) the absurdity of a noble’s acting on the public stage without anyone’s ever finding out (either by recognizing the performer as Oxford while Oxford was
onstage, or recognizing Oxford somewhere else as the performer) and noting it somewhere. Nor, to repeat anothe rof my observations, does it make any sense for Oxford to have sought to keep people from knowing he was an author through the use of a pseudonym, and gotten up on the public stage as an actor, using that very same pseudonym!

All sorts of other questions arise, like who was the second actor calling himself Shakespeare and being recorded as such on legal documents after Oxford died: where’d he come from, and what happened to him? To be unscholarly about it, the Oxford-as-Crow hypothesis is tangledly nuts to be taken seriously. We are left, then, with the actor/playwright William Shakespeare as the Crow. This is supported, in my view, by the testimony of Henry Chettle, which I discuss in another essay.

 

A New Gathering of Visual Poems and Related Art, Part 2

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Small Press Review,
Volume 44, Numbers 1/2, January/February 2012

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Illuminated Script: 30 Years of Visual Poetry & Intermedia
Guest-Editor: Andrew Topel
Script, Issue 2.2, June 2011,
Edited by Quimby Melton, with 8 Associate Editors

http://scriptjr.nl/issues/2.2

Ten Superior Visual Poems
in the Pages at Poeticks
Web-Master: Bob Grumman

 While engaged with the many fine pieces in Illuminated Script, I had an idea for a website that people could visit to see a few examples of superior visual poetry and read short commentaries on them, so be able to learn about visual poetry through more than mere exposure to them–although I’d never argue that serious exposure was not the best way to learn about them. I had the idea because of the number of works I found in the show that would be just right for such a site, four of which I thought I’d treat here, to provide an idea of both the site I plan and what’s in SCRIPTjr.nl.

The first is Marilyn R. Rosenberg’s “Drift Here” of 2003 (and I greatly approve of her dating her works, I might insert–something I fail to do all the time myself–art is wonderful, but art history is, too). Its main, large, wobbling-all-over-the-place words are “drifts,” “procrastination,” “puddling, babbling, whirling,” and, in just the right place, “lingers.” Its graphics include a small school of fish and gorgeously splishy brushstrokes in various ocean colors. “DRIFTS,” as it is actually spelled, can easily and very appropriately be taken for “DREAMS.” Changes of colors along sharp edges turn the work into a throng of rectangles working geometric precision against the swirl of all else, to suggest blocks of time in motion, being lost . . . On the other hand, the procrastination is allowing for–well, the eventual dreams I find to be one essential component of this composition. Go to my website. The work will be reproduced there, so you can see how accurate or inaccurate my commentary is.

The second piece is an untitled one by Carol Stetser. It features an array of primitive cave- or rock-figures, mostly anthropomorphic but with some animal-images thrown in and a few abstract symbols of some sort, including a vivid, unexpected, highly charged ampersand. It’s all white on black in white. Near the top is the printed label, “Pleasures and Terrors of.” Lower down in smaller print are the words, “Is it possible.” They are followed, lower, in cursive, by “We are the trustees of the future”–who seem to be represented represented by the upper torso of a human skeleton, with the side of a jaw showing, and strips of what strike me as mummy bandages covered with unreadable text. It all comes across to me as a celebration of all that early human beings bequeathed so wonderfully to us on the walls of caves and elsewhere in a kind of dark parallel with what we (may) be bequeathing to our descendants.

Number three is Márton Koppány’s “Dust.” A spectacularly simple evocation of dust and all it means that consists of a barely visible outline of the word “dust” on a dark blue page much larger than it, it resonates with its creator’s understanding of Zen koans, as is the case with much (all?) of his work. To one side of its word are two 6-shaped yellow quotation marks followed by a 9-shaped yellow quotation mark. On the other side is a second 9-shaped quotation mark, also in yellow. A yawn–unless you click sufficiently with what its punctuation is doing and its word is connoting both visually and verbally to seep through its entrance into the eternal night we’re all enclosed in. Or so it seems to me.

Last is K. S. Ernst’s “He r.” This poem, one of her should-be-famous-by-now sculptures of wooden letters on wood, these ones repeatedly spelling ‘HE’ and ‘HER’ in different sizes and orientations, drew a blank from me–until I realized it depicts the relationship between a ‘He’ and a ‘Her,’ the latter in the objective case so subordinate to the ‘He.’ But, among the many spellings of “He” and “Her” is a little s. It finishes a spelling of ‘hers.’ So who owns who?”

Now for a too-brief run-through of the work of the others in the show. Kaz Maslanka’s is important as the show’s only full-scale gathering of mathematical poetry. Most of his twenty pieces are direct equations with a fraction on one or both sides of the equal sign: e.g., one in which “Blood” is shown equal to “Liberty” times “manure” over “A Tree.” Basically statements more than lyrical imagery. Always with heightening graphic backgrounds to make them dynamically illustrated poetry (albeit not “visual poetry”).

Ebon Heath’s background in advertising design is evident in 26 deft textual designs, most of them using nothing but letters (asemically, as far as I can tell), but sometimes turning narrational in double exposures one of which has a person (the artist himself?) interacting with the text of the other.

Hassan Massoudy and Constantin Xenakis seem very different as artists from each other on the surface, but they seem to me close to identical (to Heath as well as each other) in what’s most important aesthetically in their work. Massoudy uses Arabic letters, Xenakis–well, I can’t tell from what I can make out on my screen if he uses any kind of letters; the point is that both aim for beautiful designs, gorgeous Arabic calligraphy and swirls for the former, equally engaging but computer-machined-seeming designs for the latter.

I think that perhaps six or more artists here are major (with the others not far behind). The one I am surest about is Scott Helmes–but that may only be because I’ve stolen more from his work than from anybody else’s, except maybe Karl Kempton’s, who also seems major to me. In any case, I’ve raved so much elsewhere about what he does that I’ll only say here that 72 of his pieces are in this show, and that they run the gamut from asemic to highly verbal.

Ditto with Karl Kempton’s work, of which there are over fifty highly varied pieces. Also included is a 33-frame asemic collaboration he did with Loris Essary (who shortly afterward left the scene, so far as I know) more than two decades ago, I’m sure. Very pleasant visit to the kind of typoglific (i.e., type-written letters in rectilinear placement, often crossing under or over each other) pop-art designs Kempton was doing then, and the startlingly interesting surrealistic riffs Essary worked off them.

Finally there is the work of the show’s curator, Andrew Topel. He may be the only 30–something participant in it. In any case, his work here (and elsewhere) encourages me about the future of visiotextual art, for he seems to have studied and learned from just about all the artists in the field (even having done some mathematical poems, although none of those are here). As a quick bit of evidence of his talent is his use in one piece of a blue musical staff. The use of the staff makes him cutting edge; the simple but possibly unique use of it in a circle makes him superior cutting edge.

With that, I close this installment of my column.

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A Few Mostly Egocentric Hit&Miss Observations Triggered by
Howard Gardner’s Creating Minds and George Swede’s Creativity: A New Psychology
Bob Grumman 

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3 April 2004 Revision

 

Somewhere in Creating Minds Howard Gardner expresses a hope that his book will be useful for promoting debate on the subject of cultural creativity. I don’t know how successful it’s been at doing that among real psychologists, but it has definitely knocked me into my argumentative zone. Before getting into my differences with Gardner, though, I should introduce a term of mine that will pop up here and there throughout my essay: “knowlecule.” For the purposes of this essay, a knowlecule may be thought of as the representation (or recording) in the brain of a “molecule” of knowledge (e.g., a single word in a poem, or a single leaf on a tree–or the whole tree). I consider creativity to be nothing more than the formation of links between knowlecules that have never before been connected in a given individual’s mind. (This is all close to the beliefs of Arthur Koestler.) That out of the way, I can go to Gardner. I found some aspects of his discussion interesting. One was what he said about the chronology of creativity. He speculates that in most cases, a culturateur (another of my terms, by which I mean “agent of significant cultural change through works of art, science or some other similarly major cultural activity) takes ten years or so to master the knowledge needed to pursue his vocation, then ten years later achieves a radical breakthrough in it–which he often follows in another ten years with a comprehensive masterwork. In short, Gardner suspects that creativity follows some kind of ten-year cycle. What I like about this hypothesis of Gardner’s is that it makes sense that our species would have evolved in such a manner that a person would reach physical and sexual maturity at about the same time as he would master (a) the general knowledge required to participate as an adult in his community and (b) the specific knowledge required to fill a particular vocational niche in his community. My own creative careers in theoretical psychology, playwriting, the novel, poetry, literary criticism and a few lesser areas are outside Gardner’s scheme, since my contributions have not yet become widely valued. But either I will someday be recognized as a culturateur or I am an “abberateur” (i.e., an agent of abberation). If I’m a not-yet-recognized culturateur, my creative history ought to fit Gardner’s scheme; if not, it is still an interesting question whether or not his scheme works for ineffective as well as for effective creativity. In any case, I’m something of an expert at trying to be creative, so will use my own experiences to discuss Gardner’s ideas. At the age of 26 I seem to have come up out of nowhere with a theory of psychology that was highly ambitious and wide-ranging (it covered sensory perception, creativity, pain & pleasure, aesthetic taste, dreams, character-types, psychological differences between the genders, emotion, comedy, and a good deal else). I had no certified background in psychology. I’d read a few books on psychology, and one on aesthetic taste that influenced my thinking, and had since adolescence often thought about categories of people, especially after reading The Lonely Crowd, and a book about Sheldon’s personality-types. I’d also thought about how the mind might work. But I don’t consider myself then to have entered the field of psychology in any reasonable sense. My theory was very sketchy in places, revealing my limited background in the field. I’m convinced, however, that it was also a radical breakthrough. Certainly it was unlike any other theory of psychology current then or now–that I know of.  Be that as it may, I worked out my first comprehensive version of it less than five years after first putting it together. Approximately ten years later, I made my first large-scale addition to the theory, which was sort of a minor breakthrough as it included my discovery (or invention of the concept) of a kind of awareness not hitherto considered by other psychologists (as a separate “intelligence”): sagaceptuality, or narrative-awareness. (This, to be very brief, has to do with a person’s awareness of himself as the hero of a saga and is the basis of goal-directedness, deriving from the hunting-instinct that I believe even primitive organisms have; it also derives from the predator-avoidance instinct we all also seem to have–in which case one’s sagaceptual goal is escape from an evil rather than acquisition of a good.) I was (in my opinion) fairly culturateurical in other ways, too. In fact, I believe I was as creative in this phase as I had been to begin with, but since I was working on a structure already under way instead of working from scratch, it might not have seemed so. By the time I wrote my first plays at 18, I probably could be said to have spent ten or more years in the field of literature, as almost anyone would have in our culture, since everyone is exposed as schoolchildren to literature from elementary school on. And I had been a stage performer (as a comic magician) from the age of eleven or so. My serious interest in reading plays began when I was 16. So my first plays somewhat obeyed the ten-year scheme: that is, I started writing them about ten years after entering the field of drama. My outburst of play- writing in my thirties began 12 years or so later, and it was then, if ever, I wrote my breakthrough plays (and consider them-breakthrough plays–only for me). I don’t believe I had a radical breakthrough as a poet until I was in my forties, some twenty years after I had become at least a journeyman in the field. As for my career in literary criticism, it began informally in high school or before. I would say it became serious with the reviews and critiques I began writing for college courses in my mid-thirties. About ten years later I experienced a sort of breakthrough with a series of essays and letters on the taxonomy of experimental poetry. These resulted three or four years later in a book that I consider a more consequential but still minor breakthrough in literary criticism. I wrote two abandoned novels and one horrible finished one between the ages of 19 and 29, then wrote not even a short story until just three years ago I wrote a 200,000-word science fiction novel I’m now awaiting a rejection slip from a publisher for. The chronology is weird there, unless one counts my novels and plays as all parts of my prose narrative career, which would make sense. The novel might then be the comprehensive prose narrative supposed to follow breakthrough efforts, which would be the plays I wrote 25 years previously. I doubt the chronological scheme works for those active in more than one sphere. In seems to me, in conclusion, that only by straining can any of my careers be fit into Gardner’s ten-year scheme. Few, I’m sure, would disagree that it needs much further exploration. I think a main point to determine is if most cultural fields seem to take a person about ten years fully to assimilate–or some other set length of time. If so, I hypothesize that the culturateur, due to his innate cerebral wiring, becomes bored with his career field almost as soon as he masters it (i.e., finds it too predictable), and must destroy it (at least partially), then rebuild it, the process taking perhaps ten years. Let me say in passing that it is this need to turn his field upside-down that makes him seem “asynchronous,” not–as Gardner has it–his need to be asynchronous that makes him turn his field upside-down. I differ much more with Gardner’s belief in the significant connection of creativity to, well, child-mindedness than I do with his hypothesized chronology of creativity. I dispute not the connection but that it’s anything special. All adult human beings are part-children. Consider, for instance, the popularity of both participant and spectator sports. Consider all the fun pastimes that people pursue. Consider also how many adult things children do–like work six hours a day. (What else is a school but a factory that children work in six hours or so a day?) Gardner also makes the standard assumption that children are naturally creative. I say they’re only micreative Or only creative enough to adjust to normal changes in their circumstances), and that their charming mistakes are charming only to someone who rarely sees them. Most kids, like most adults, conform, and their mistakes are similar to the mistakes of their peers (which the beaming parent won’t see). Most kids are not particularly adventurous but just follow the lead of the creative few amongst them. I would suggest that we need better definitions of adultness and childness before we can explore the possibility that creative people are more childlike than non-creative people. As for others of Gardner’s ideas, I don’t know what to make of “the Faustian Bargain” he speaks of. It seems to me that non-creative superstitious people probably Faustianly bargain with God or the Devil for vocational success as frequently as creative people. I, myself, never have. (Oops, maybe that’s my problem!) I don’t remember any of the many culturateurs I’ve read about having made such a bargain. What Gardner says about support at the time of a culturateur’s breakthrough makes sense but seems trivial: everyone needs, and usually has, support–throughout life. I do tend to think that highly creative people automatically gravitate to each other, and provide each other with important vocational support. But I don’t see that that has much to do with creativity, only with happiness. Friends are useful, but the only sine qua non for a cultural breakthrough is a sufficiently effective brain. (Opportunity is also irrelevant: a sufficiently effective brain will make opportunities for itself, find ways to thwart enemies and the establishment, and refuse to turn itself off–indeed, be unable to turn itself off–and forsake a creative vocation for conventional, paying work.) That there must also be a vocational field in need of creation or re-arrangement is possible; yet I tend to think that the culturateur will automatically, though not necessarily without trouble, find a field suitable to his gifts. I also doubt that any field could ever be closed to further significant breakthroughs. Nor do I believe any person is likely to be born with an array of intelligences he can’t make a cultural breakthrough somewhere with–that is, I think Einstein would have been a genius in physics regardless of when he’d been born–with the proviso that he would have to have been born in a place where his gifts would be useful since it doesn’t make sense a given genetic gift would evolve in a location it was not needed in.). I go along with Gardner on a culturateur’s need to find a vocation suited to his particular array of intelligences. (Gardner, I should point out, is a leading proponent of the belief that people have several intelligences, something I believe, as well, although I posit a different set of intelligences than he does.) That is, I doubt that a person’s general intelligence will allow him to perform equally well or poorly, regardless of the field he chooses. On the other hand, I believe that each of us does have a general intelligence, and that this general intelligence has much to do with one’s success in the field of one’s choice. Gardner does not believe in a general intelligence. Gardner and I also disagree about Graham Wallas’s four-stage scheme of creativity, which I remember as (1) recognition of problem; (2) incubation; (3) arrival of solution; (4) testing of solution–which, if the solution breaks down, will lead back to (1) and a repetition of the process. This has always made sense to me and describes my own creative experiences perfectly. Gardner, however, believes that Wallas’s first step incorrectly assumes the existence of a problem to be solved, which would be valid in the sciences, for him, but not in the arts. He’s wrong. In poetry, for example, the problem will usually be to express a certain idea or image or feeling in a vital way, or to find an idea, image or feeling that a technique one already has can be used to express (in a vital way). So, to be poetically creative about a tree, say, a poet will recognize his need to say what he wants to about it–and be unable immediately to (since only known and therefore uncreative solutions to problems are immediately available). Consequently, he will store the problem (and his preliminary encounters with it). I would consider step (1) in the scheme, by the way, to really be (1a) encountering a problem, and (1b) engaging it unsuccessfully. At length, step (2), incubation, will follow–with the combination of knowlecules that represents the problem being subjected, in effect, to radiation–or haphazard nips of passing knowlecules, while at the same time also becoming de-contextualized and able to make new connections. Both of these processes, I might add, are basically simple but would require too much background in my theory to allow me to go into greater detail about them here). Eventually, when the combination of knowlecules has links to new knowlecules and/or has lost links to no longer (or perhaps never) useful knowlecules, and something extraneous causes the poet to think of his poem (e.g., he sees a tree like the one he wanted to write the poem about), he remembers the problem, and it enters his mind, solved, thus taking care of step (3). Then, in step (4), the poet thinks about his solution, works it against models of what-a-good-poem-should-be and sees–probably without thinking verbally about it (what the mystics call “unconsciously”)–whether it works or not. If so, he has a poem, or a line toward a poem, or whatever. If not, step (4) becomes step (1) and the procedure is repeated. The same process will occur in the dance. There, a Martha Graham might be practicing a dance and find that she’s become bored with some move because it’s become too predictable. In other words, she’s found a problem to solve. If she can’t quickly solve it with simple creativity (micreativity of the kind anybody might have), she’ll have to shelve it for incubation. At another time she might think of a plot she wants to provide a dance for. Some moves will come, some won’t–which will give her problems to solve, each like all problems. Thus the dance that results will be the sum of small problems solved, not one large solved problem–although it will be that, too, in a sense. While on the subject of Wallas’s scheme, I should point out that George Swede claims in his Creativity, A New Psychology, that it has failed to be verified by controlled studies. The one empirical study Swede describes found that people not interrupted while trying to solve problems did as well as people subjected to interruptions, which seems to refute the necessity of Wallas’s incubation step. I believe, however, that the study had to do only with micreativity–with finding already-known but not readily available solutions and applying them in minor ways to only slightly new material, and so had nothing to do with culturateurical creativity. In the field of poetry such micreativeness often produces fine poems, even major poems, but that only shows that creativity isn’t necessary for the production of a masterpiece in the arts or sciences–at the time of the masterpiece’s production. What I mean is that a person might create a masterpiece based on previous highly original techniques as opposed to newly original techniques. I might write five very original but flawed poems, for instance, then write a totally unoriginal but unflawed one that used all the innovations I’d come up with in the previous five poems. The result might be a masterpiece but it would not be highly original. Another possibility is that a poet might compose a major poem that is highly original without seeming to pause for a period of incubation when what actually happens is that the poem gets its original portion from material previously incubated. That is, without realizing it, a poet trying to compose a poem in one sitting might spontaneously insert into it a previously incubating and now solved problem he had forgotten about. An example based on personal experience: I once walked around with the problem of having the idea of using the number one as a mathematical exponent in a poem but not having any appropriate words to go with it. I gave up. Much later I was working on a poem about Emerson, and suddenly saw a way to use the one as an exponent in it. I did remember my previously storing the idea of the one as exponent in a poem, but if I hadn’t, I and any observer of how I went about making my poem would have concluded that I’d been creatively successful without pausing for incubation. It is also possible that a kind of very short-term incubation might sometimes take place: for example, someone might try to put an image into a poem that’s under way and fail. Only moments later, though, after only one or two other attempts to make a line work, the poet might see how to use the image–because some form of very brief incubation had occurred. In short, I feel certain that incubation is necessary for true creativity. Since I brought George Swede into this essay, I should acknowledge that his book has very favorably influenced my thoughts on levels of creativity (most of which I hope to write about later). but that I don’t consider his distinction between culturateurs who collaborate and culturateurs who don’t useful. Each vocational field’s culturateurs will differ in many ways from every other vocational field’s, and one of the ways they differ will be in how much they interact with others. I think that no culturateur can be considered major if all his best works are collaborations–collaborations, that is, whose parts are inseparable. (Stravinsky collaborated with choreographers but his ballet music could be performed by itself. Kaufman and Hart, on the other hand, were full-scale collaborators, and minor. I have a few ideas why this should be so but they’re in the incubation stage at the moment.) Whew, I have so much more to say about creativity, but I’ve run out of gas for the moment. Note: both Swede’s and Gardner’s books are available through Amazon (amazon.com).

 

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THE EARL OF DERBY AND OTHERS

William Stanley (1561—1642), sixth Early of Derby, actually had the backing of a certified authority in the literature of Shakespeare’s period, Professor Abel Lefranc of the College de France. Lefranc forwarded the candidacy of Derby with his two-volume Sous le masque de ‘William Shakespeare’ (1918, 1919). He disposed of Shakespeare the usual way: by denying there was anything in the Oeuvre that corresponded to anything in the Stratford man’s life. His arguments for Derby were that Derby, as indicated principally by Loves Labours Lost (which has French characters!), understood the spirit of France, spoke cultured and colloquial French and knew at first hand the manners of court life from having spent some time at the Court of Navarre. Blah blah blah. I’m afraid I have neither the time nor patience to give Derby a fair hearing. Needless to say, none of his advocates has come up with any direct evidence for him, or against Shakespeare.

To give what I consider a fair idea of the strained thinking of the Derbyites, however, I will deign to discuss a prime example of their reasoning, as described by Michell:

While studying the history of the Court of Navarre, as described in the Memoires de Marguerite de Valois, Lefranc came across a remarkable story, an almost exact parallel to that of Ophelia in Hamlet. It was a favourite story of Queen Marguerite, and if William Stanley was at her court he would doubtless have heard it.

One of her ladies-in-waiting had a daughter, Helene, who went to stay with her married sister and there fell in love with the marquis de Varembon, the brother of her sister’s husband. He wanted to marry her, but he was already destined for the Church and his brother objected. Helene went sadly back to her mother, who was unkind to her. Meanwhile, de Varembon gave up the idea of becoming a priest, and he and his brother came to Helene’s district with the queen’s court. Marguerite invited her to stay with them at Namur, but the young man acted coldly towards Helene and left abruptly. The poor girl was so heart­broken that she could only breathe by crying out in pain. Some days later she died of grief.

A great funeral was arranged, and, just as the flower-decked coffin was approaching the grave, a disturbance arose. A few days after he had left, the marquis realized that he was deeply in love with Helene, and hastened back to propose marriage. He entered the town to find the streets crowded with mourners. Pushing his way up to the coffin, he asked whose it was, and on hearing the story fell off his horse in a dead faint. As described in the Memoires, his soul, ‘allant dans le tombeau requerir pardon’ (going into the grave to ask forgiveness), he appeared for a time lifeless.

This is the familiar story in Hamlet. Ophelia loves Hamlet and he at heart loves her, but he leaves her cruelly, and takes ship for England. Ophelia goes mad with sorrow and drowns in a stream. Hamlet returns unexpectedly, and encounters the funeral as the flower-strewn coffin is lowered into the grave. He asks whose funeral it is, and upon hearing that it is his true love who had died for his sake, he leaps bodily into the grave, rather than spiritually like the Frenchman. When challenged by Laertes he cries out:

          I lov’d Ophehia: forty thousand brothers            Could not, with all their quantity of love            Make up my sum.

There is no other source for the tragedy of Ophelia and Hamlet than this beautiful old French love-story. It was known to Shakespeare, because there is an allusion to it in Loves Labours Lost (v. 2), where Rosaline reminds Katharine how Cupid killed her sister, and Katharine remembers how she died of love. It was this allusion which, when Lefranc discovered its source, led him to discover the origin of the Ophelia story.

Michell calls this “highly convincing”; I will only say I suspect many writers of the time had heard the same story, or one much like it, and I can’t believe any of them would have had to visit Navarre like Derby to have been able to use it in a play.

For me, about the only points in Derby’s favor as a candidate are that he was a Will and that he was once reported as having been writing plays for the common players. Against him, besides the usual lack of direct evidence, is that he lived almost twenty years beyond 1623 when the First Folio said Shakespeare was dead (and new plays by Shakespeare stopped appearing).

A Newcomer

Since I wrote the last published edition of my book, a NASA scientist named Sabrina Feldman came out with The Apocryphal William Shakespeare, a book in support of Thomas Sackville, First Earl of Dorset, as the noble Shakespeare fronted for.  You can read about it here.  Only Marlowe seems a more plausible True Bard than Sackville–or would have had he not been killed in 1593.  Like Marlowe, Sackville was a pioneer in drama, co-writing the first blank-verse play in English, Gorboduc, with Thomas Norton.  He was also an admired poet.  Feldman’s case for him makes more sense than Ogburn’s for Oxford, say, but it’s nowhere near strong enough to counter the very strong case for Shakespeare, which Feldman counters no more effectively than all the others against Shakespeare before her.

What I love about her book is its coverage of Sackville, an important figure I hadn’t know much about, and its coverage of the plays–more than a handful–with Shakespeare’s name or initials on them but which he did not write, according to most Shakespeare scholars.  These plays are well worth becoming acquainted with.

Alas, I’ve become too lazy to do justice to The Apocryphal William Shakespeare here, but hope that when its author (with whom I’m in touch) has time, she will send me a summary of its central thesis.  If so, I’ll plug it into this chapter.

Other Aristocrats

Roger Manners (1576-1612), fifth Earl of Rutland, seems the best of the other major candidates.  His main backer seems t have been Celestin Demblon.  According to Michell, he “went through all the works of Shakespeare, and from each play and poem deduced the author’s temperament, circumstances and mood when he wrote it. These he compared with the biography of Roger Manners, and found that in every case the two sets of data perfectly or adequately matched each other.” Yow, just how many candidates is this true of?! Only Will Shakespeare fails the Great Biographical Test.

Rutland doesn’t do so well otherwise. Aside from the utter lack of direct evidence for him, and all there is of that for Shakespeare, insuperable chronological problems fore and aft do him in. He could not plausibly have written the narrative poems in his teens, nor been attacked by Greene as an upstart actor at the age of 16, even if Greene didn’t mind attacking an aristocrat. After 1612, when Rutland died, there were references to a living Shakespeare—for instance, Edmund Howes’s previously mentioned reference to a gentleman (i.e., non-aristocrat) named Willi. Shakespeare who was one of Howes’s “moderne, and present excellent Poets.”

Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney, the Queen herself, and many others, have their advocates, but I’m afraid I have to say the hell with them. Ditto all of them altogether as a group-author, which is Michell’s pet theory. It certainly explains everything. That so many could be involved in such an enterprise without any direct evidence of its getting out is preposterous, to understate it. There is also the near-fact that no great unified work of literature was ever created by a committee.

The Conspiracy

It is almost unfair, after demolishing the candidacy of all the authorship pretenders except Shakespeare to consider the conspiracy that each depends on, but thoroughness requires me to. And I said I would. It won’t be easy. For one thing, the conspiracy is differently described by just about every anti-Stratfordian, and never laid out completely. Like no other conspiracy in history I know of, it also seems  often to contradict itself, sometimes trying to conceal, sometimes reveal, the identity of the True Author (as I’ve already shown many times).

Some who believe there was some kind of conspiracy reason that its incoherence is due merely to our insufficiency of facts for analysis. But just as I refuse to accept ESP not only because I’ve seen no convincing direct evidence of it and because no one has presented a satisfactory theory as to how it works neurophysiologically in human beings, nor of how it may have come about evolutionarily, I refuse to accept the idea that Shakespeare became a front for some other writer not only because I’ve seen no convincing direct evidence for it but also because no one has presented a satisfactory theory, or scenario, as to how it may have come about, and why. The anti-Stratfordians need not show me what happened, just what plausibly could have happened. This they have failed to do, so far as I’m concerned. Nevertheless, I’ll try to describe their scenarios as best I can, and deal with them.

To begin with, in any authorship hoax, no matter who the The True Author is, he must have had some plausible motive for concealing his identity. The following are all the plausible ones I’ve been able to come with from my long study of the literature and from the help of those at HLAS who responded to my call for help on the question:

(1) to avoid the stigma of print, or of association with the public stage

This is the most famous motive, but several nobles were known to have written plays, among them Oxford, Derby and Sidney’s sister. Many poems were published with nobles’ names on them, too. This makes it hard to believe in a complex conspiracy’s being set up just to allow someone to put his plays on the public stage. Why the need for more than the court performances nobles were allowed? Or for the novels like Sidney’s, which also seem to have been permissible? Even if one were driven by one’s inner voices to have one’s plays acted on the public stage, why not just let them be, and claim it was without permission? Or just have them appear anonymously?

Specifically against this motive is the absence of direct evidence or significant circumstantial evidence that any playwright had it.

(2) to avoid causing grief to the ruling class.

The idea here is that if it were known someone privy to the doings of the ruling class were writing the plays, what they revealed about that class would be certified as actual and turn the masses dangerously against it.

Against this are the fact that the Shakespearean plays can only by the most strained reasoning be shown to reveal anything about what was really going on among the members of the ruling class–and that it would be ridiculously more easy to simply leave out suspect portions of the tainted plays than start a great conspiracy to make those portions harder to notice. Indeed, many playwrights of the day were forced to do exactly that by the government censor. This would seem mandatory since the authorities would have to consider any truly inappropriate bits potentially noticeable even without their author’s name on them–that is, if Hamlet truly revealed the corruption of Queen Elizabeth’s court, for example, the populace might realize it even without Oxford’s name or that of some other insider on the play. So the authorities would have to censor it. And why, I might add, would a front risk being blamed for the incendiary parts of a play?

(3) to escape the wrath of those satirized or otherwise insulted in the plays

Against this is the fact that the plays can only by the most strained reasoning be shown to seriously satirize any particular person, and even if they did, why–again–start a complex conspiracy (which might not succeed) instead of just leaving out the potentially offensive bits. And why would a front go along with it?

(4) to protect a living author wanting to be thought dead

This seems the only valid motive to me, particularly if the author would be in grave danger if thought still alive; the problem with it is that there was no such author around at the time, according to all the hard, and just about all the circumstantial, evidence.

(5) A corollary of this is (what I take to be) Peter Farey’s belief that the authorities had to severely punish The True Author for his offenses, real or not, since they couldn’t let him go on being seen as getting away with High Crimes, whatever his possibly virtuous underlying motives for them. Some of them wanted to go ahead and punish him but were overruled by those reluctant to do so. Hence, they had him pretend to have been murdered so they wouldn’t have to (although his “exile” would itself be a punishment). In the case of Farey’s man, Marlowe, this would protect him from those who thought he should be executed for sedition and atheism but would be satisfied with his being exiled from his name and previous life. It would also satisfy the Puritans, who would take him to have been properly punished (by God Himself, in their eyes) for his iconoclasm.

Not only is this somewhat far-fetched, with no direct or significant indirect evidence for it, but, as I said before about the whole Marlowe faked-death scenario, if it were so important to the government that such a hoax could be carried out, the pro-Marlowe forces in the government would have been powerful enough to get their way much more easily; in this case, by simply stating that all Marlowe said was in his role as an undercover agent only pretending to believe what he said.

(6) to let the plays speak for themselves, without their author’s high rank and/or celebrity getting in the way, as artworks or propaganda; in the latter case, it might be thought preferable if it weren’t known that a government official were involved (since official involvement might make the populace the plays were supposed to indoctrinate in right thinking suspicious, and therefore resistant)

This seems a weak motive for a complex conspiracy but (perhaps) not altogether idiotic; but there’s close to no evidence, whatever, for it.

(7) timidity

This seems to be a motive for many pseudonyms and is certainly plausible, although most of the candidates wrote under their own names at times, which renders excessive modesty inapplicable to them, one would think. It would also fail to explain The True Author’s use of the name of a living man closely associated with the works he was writing.

(8) to simplify joint authorship involving more than two or three contributors by giving the results to a single author All I can say against this is that there’s no evidence for  any joint authorship, and with several authors involved, one would expect some evidence of it.

(9) to obey the queen and/or Burghley and/or some other powerful figure who, in anger, decided to punish the True Author for some misdeed by not allowing him to use his name on his literary works.

Against this is only absence of evidence for it, and its ludicrousness. But it is indeed a motive seriously suggested by one anti-Stratfordian. All the other hypothesized motives I was able to round up seem equally or more preposterous than this one. But it’s always possible that there could have been some not unreasonable motive we can’t guess at.

To summarize to this point, I would say that while the motive or motives for anyone’s having decided to conceal his identity as a writer are not impressive, and evidence for anyone’s having done so just about non-existent, it could still have happened (most likely for a combination of the reasons given). Which leads us to the second important question about the situation: did The True Author choose his pen-name, “Will Shake-speare,” out of thin air, or did he decide from the beginning to use a front, and the front’s name?

The anti-Stratfordians unthinkingly assumed the second for a long time, but eventually even they realized how bad it would be for their case if their candidate picked Shakespeare as his front since that would certify Shakespeare as a plausible writer. That is, anyone who could pass as a writer would have to be able to write and sound educated—would, in short, have been qualified, at least on the surface, to have been a writer. Aside from that, it can’t help the anti-Stratfordian cause for the Stratford man to have been an actor since to that would give him most of the qualifications for being a writer he’d need. It would also put him in what is obviously the best possible occupation in the best possible place at the best possible time to have written the plays. Consequently, in recent times, anti-Stratfordians have swung to the belief that The True Author picked the name “Will Shake-speare” only because it was such a good one (and, in Oxford’s case, Gabriel Harvey had, in effect, suggested it–allegedly). It had nothing to do with the Stratford man.

One large huge problem with this is the unlikelihood that the True Author would start using his pseudonym in print at just the time that a bumpkin from Stratford with the same name or a similar one showed up in a London acting company–in the very company putting on The True Author’s plays! The ingenious Ogburn explained this away by supposing that Will Shakspere noticed the (very slight) resemblance of his name to that of The True Author, and started passing himself off as he. The True Author could not protest, of course, without giving the game away. (The anti-Stratfordians do not explain, however, how the powerful Oxford, or even just Marlowe’s high-placed friends, could not have stopped the bumpkin behind the scenes.)

But let’s grant that The True Author did decide to conceal himself under the pen-name, Will Shake-speare, and turn to the most significant question about any conspiracy: whether or not it would have required so many hoaxsters as to be too impractical to succeed. To answer that, we need to consider, first, how many people would have been needed to explain such items as:

1. the Stratford monument’s declaring the Stratford man a writer comparable for art to Virgil and now dwelling on Olympus;

2. the First Folio’s stating several times in various ways that the Stratford man was the author

3. Howes’s refering to Shakespeare the Poet as a “gentleman”;

4. Basse’s explicitly equating the Stratford man with the poet;

5.. Meres’s mentioning at least two of the main candidates, Marlowe and Oxford, as different persons from Shakespeare;

6. the Parnassus plays’ and Beaumont’s speaking of Shakespeare the poet’s not having been a university man like all the other candidates;

7. the hoaxsters’ perfectly preventing a single piece of direct evidence that The True Author wrote the Oeuvre, or even that he ever used a pseudonym, much less the pseudonym, “Shake-speare,” in particular, from getting out;

8. the hoaxsters’ perfectly preventing a single piece of direct evidence that Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon did not write the Oeuvre from getting out.

The first six items could be explained by assuming forgeries or lies, but that would take a lot of conspirators. If we instead take all the people involved to be simple dupes, we need conspirators preventing them from finding out The Truth: there would have to have been people to keep from seeing The True Author writing; there would have been he or an agent delivering plays, and advice to those acting in them. In many cases, there would also have been people aware of earlier works in The True Author’s real name that seemed very similar to works now said to be by another who had somehow to be kept from gossipping. There would have been the problem of supervising the Stratford man, too. Anti-Stratfordian Paul Crowley believes an agent of the government was sent to Stratford to make sure he did not talk–even if only to say he was not a poet. But others who knew that the Stratford man never spent any time writing would have had to have been watched, too. And those who might have noticed how little he knew of the plays or the subject matter of the plays he was supposed to have written.

It could be argued that few need have been involved in the conspiracy required to keep The True Author’s identity concealed, particularly if–as many suggest–he made no attempt to hide the fact that “Will Shake-speare” was a pen-name, only whom it was a pen-name for. But if he really wanted to hide his identity, why would he let it be known that a secret author did exist? And, if everyone knew “Shakespeare” was some unknown writer’s pseudonym, why would so many witnesses mistakenly identify him as a known actor? That could only mean that they did not take “Shakespeare” as a pseudonym–or else that they were in on the conspiracy, which, again, must enlarge it considerably, making it less likely to have been able to remain secret. Whether those testifying that Shakespeare was an actor as well as a poet were telling what they took to be the truth or lying, the actor, if he were not The True Author, would have to have been pretending to be; otherwise, how could they think or lie that he was? And there would have to be people making it look like the Stratford man was The True Author—either those lying that he was, or those setting up the dupes to say he was.

Assuming that The True Author was The True Actor using a stage-name doesn’t make matters much better, for one then needs to explain how a Noble, fearing the stigma of association with the public stage, or arrest for capital crimes against the state, would have dared to act on the public stage; and why a writer trying to conceal his identity as the author of various plays, would act in them under the pseudonym he chose to conceal his true identity with. There is also the minor detail of the records showing the actor to be alive after some of the candidates were known not to be. Volker Multhopp’s explanation (that a second imposter took over for him as The True Actor after he died) may not convince too many. Also to be explained is Shakespeare of Stratford’s speaking of three actors as his fellows in his will.

Assuming the The True Author was the actor also fails to reduce the number of people required to have been involved in the conspiracy, for it would have to include all the people in the True Actor’s acting company, at least some of the audiences who watched the plays he was in, and all kinds of other theatre people. Volker Multhopp believes all these and any other people who knew The Truth could easily have kept quiet out of respect for The True Author, and perhaps because they knew the Queen wanted them to keep quiet. (She may even have passed a secret law.) All this still makes conspirators of these people, however.

In short, however one constructs the plot to make the Stratford man falsely seem to be the poet, it seems unquestionable that a highly complicated long-term conspiracy involving numerous hoaxsters would have been required—and/or a host of people going along with it (in spite of the hatred some of them had for The True Author–Oxford’s enemies, about to be beheaded because of him, accusing him of pederesty and treason–but not of playwriting, for example).

The conspiracy theory has other defects, needless to say. A principal one is that either it fooled a huge number of sober citizens, such as the ones who put up the Stratford Monument, or it required elaborate forgeries and lies. One finds it hard to believe that the people who lived with Shakespeare could have believed him a great writer had he not been a writer at all, or that the acting Shakespeare could have convinced his fellow actors for years that he was a playwright (despite his need to run to some castle to make the simplest rewrite) .

But it is even more difficult to believe that the alleged forgers could have gotten away with their deeds or—that they would have bothered with them! Why, as I’ve asked before, would they have thought a reference to Burbage, Heminges and Condell in Shakespeare’s will would have been read by enough casual will-readers to help their hoax, but not read by Shakespeare’s lawyer or anyone else who would recognize the crime that had been committed and entirely wreck their mission? And just to make a connection between Shakespeare and the King’s Men! And when they had gone to the trouble of going to Stratford to put an inscription on Shakespeare’s monument that indicated his authorship, why did they not make that inscription as persuasive as they easily could have (by, for instance, referring to even one play that Shakespeare was supposed to have composed)? Et cetera.

Ogburn asserts that if the hoaxsters forged conclusive evidence that Shakespeare was an author, a group of people who knew he wasn’t would laugh or otherwise raise a commotion that would defeat the project, but, Ogburn theorizes, that problem could be gotten past if hints rather than conclusive evidence were contrived. If, for instance, the hoaxsters said on Shakespeare’s monument that he rivaled Virgil in art, this group would be puzzled but not make any comments about it—as they would if the hoaxsters said on the monument that he wrote Hamlet. But why, I ask, could the hoaxsters not at least have alluded in Shakespeare’s will to “his writings,” for instance, asking, say, that they be turned over to Richard Burbage, “who would know what to do with them?”

Another explanation is that the conspirators really didn’t care whether their hoax worked or not; but if that were the case, why did they go to so much obvious risk and trouble? And how did they haphazardly nonetheless manage to succeed so well (near-perfectly, in fact) in carrying out the concealment of Oxford or Marlowe or whoever as the True Author and of Shakespeare as an obvious imposter?

I’m done with this. I really thought when I started analyzing it that I’d end with a much better grasp of how a Shakespeare authorship conspiracy might have worked, but I remain as confused as ever.

Conclusion

What we are left with, after considering the various pretenders to the position of True Bard is incredulity that anyone could take any of them seriously. To sum up, the anti-Stratfordian, whoever his candidate is, has six major problems:

(1) the case for Shakespeare is very strong

(2) there is no direct evidence for his man, only weak circumstantial evidence at best and not very plausible speculations

(3) there is direct evidence against his man, in most cases, and strong circumstantial evidence against him in the other cases

(4) some kind of highly implausible conspiracy theory or equally implausible “open secret” is necessary

(5) it’s a stretch to find a plausible motive for his man’s concealing his True Identity

(6) there seems to be as much reason for believing other candidates than his man were Shakespeare as there is for believing his man was

No anti-Stratfordian has come close to effectively dealing with even one of these problems. In fact, even if it could be shown that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon were not the True Bard, one (if not wholly nuts) would have to conclude that The Oeuvre was authorless—as Diana Price, in effect, has. No one yet is officially on record with that theory.

Next Chapter here–when ready.
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Bob Grumman

Although modern visio-textual art has been around for most of the century, it has for a long time been without a satisfactory taxonomy, although a few scattered eccentrics, I among them, have named bits and pieces of the field. Now, however, it has found its Linnaeus–in the person of Me. Or so I will attempt to establish here.

My visio-textual taxonomizing began some twenty or so years ago, in the early seventies. Exposed then to the Emmett Williams and Mary Ellen Solt anthologies of concrete poetry, I realized that certain poems therein were not verbal! That is, while they had textual matter, they had no words! How could poetry, from ancient times a verbal art, have no words? The taxonomic solution to this seems simple now, but it took me a while to figure out. I simply separated art comprised of both textual and visual matter into two kinds, one in which the textual matter has precedence, and one in which the visual matter has precedence. I called the first of these “visual poetry,” a term others were using at the time for “concrete poetry” and which I thought more precise than the latter (as well as free of certain unfortunate socio-polical connotations that “concrete poetry” had begun accumulating). I tried various names for the other of the two, settling (after many years) on “textual illumagery,” the latter word being my term for visual art.

The two kinds of art together I came to call “vizlature” (for “visual literature,” even though I question whether textual illumagery is a kind of literature). Later I expanded “vizlature” to its present meaning as art that contains both textual and visual matter (or: visio-textual art).

The first poet outside the Solt and Williams anthologies whose work I tried my taxonomy out on was Karl Kempton. His vizlature split quite neatly into my two kinds. Take, for instance, his “JUMP/SKIP/FLIP/LEAP,” the poem directly following. On the surface, it depicts in op-art fashion exactly what the words in its title verbally mean–with consonance and a rhyme visually as well as auditorily collaborating in the process, and glittering into the pleasant surprise of the poem’s identical four smallest rectangular prisms. At the same time, on a subtler level, the poem forms a pulsatingly energized flower to visually serve as what I term a “juxtaphor” (or implicit metaphor) for the child- lithe love of the physical life that jumping, skipping, flipping and leaping express. In short, the poem’s words say what it is about, and its visual representation on the page expands what it is about into poetry. It is thus clearly a visual poem.

 

 

It is also an example of a classical concrete poem in that it contains nothing but text. There are still those who argue that a genuine visual (or concrete) poem should, like Kempton’s poem, rely on the arrangement of its text only for its visual effect. The poem by Clemente Padin below, with its boarded window acting as a juxtaphor for what the death of her husband does to a woman (i.e., both reduces her by a letter, and closes her) would thus not qualify as a visual poem. This is absurdly limiting–and a leading reason that “visual poetry” is in much wider use now than “concrete poetry” for speaking about these sorts of poems.
 

 

Another Kempton work, a piece from a sequence in homage to Erik Satie that he composed on an electric typewriter in 1976, nicely demonstrates what I mean by a textual illumagery, for although it is entirely textual, consisting of nothing but upper-case D’s, it has no (explicit) words. One at first wonders what the point of the D’s is–why D’s instead of A’s or Q’s or dots or dashes of purple? A study of the occult sciences and related disciplines might provide the answer, for I know Kempton to be highly conscious of the numerological, astrological and/or hermetic values of the letters he chooses. For those of us without a Jungian temperment, though, the letters’ suggestion of sounds and near-sounds, and of language, and their visual value as design elements are their only aesthetic value. That, however, turns out to be a great deal. As dots of sound or near-sound, the D’s here seem to chant the poem they comprise into unsilent being. Meanwhile, by severely reducing his D’s connection to language, Kempton alerts us to their visio-aesthetic charms–such as the tension between their rounded and straight sides (which brings sail-filling breezes to mind, among other things, for me).

 

But the D’s retain their identity as elements of language however asemantically Kempton has used them, so also suggest something of the way dots of language build matter. At the same time they build a second tension, this one between their ambience as abstract symbols and the Klee-like purely sensual appeal of the visual design Kempton has created. This latter, by the way, I see as depicting a fellow half-jumping as he holds up a poster bearing Good News (and how the D’s vivid change from outline to background accentuates that Good News!), but it is obviously open to scores of other equally plausible, and enjoyable, interpretations. By any standard, the work is a wonderful piece of art, whatever it’s taxonomized as, and I emphasize this to fight the misconception of so many in the field that to call something not a visual poem is to denigrate it. For me the best textual illumages have always been absolutely as good as the best visual poems.

For a while my simple division of vizlature into visual poetry and textual illumagery worked quite well. Then I began being exposed to visio-textual collages, like the work below, which is from Bill DiMichele’s 1983-4 sequence, (Above) At The Meeting Of White Witches. Here (and interactively throughout DiMichele’s sequence as a whole) the juxtapositioning of incongruous texts and graphics boils up a brew rich enough to keep commentators going for decades. Among the highlights: the wend of “in” from “brains” to “things” to “unkingly” to “thin”; the strange brother-or-cousin act of “briars” and “brains”–with each other and with “Tee thand things” (which calls to mind images of the brain as briars/teeth that catch things/cause pain); the relationship of Jesus, especially the Jesus of the Turin Shroud, to credit cards; the significance of the other references to religion, and to the chart of the “cosmic octaves of radiation” a part of which DiMichele shows here; the distorted man fondling the somehow sexually vibrant female carcass so near “briarsand brains”; the “thin fairgrounds” that consciousness, or reality, ultimately is . . . Such a combination of words and graphics had to be considered a visual poem–but it was so much different from visual poems like Kempton’s “JUMP/SKIP/FLIP/LEAP!” Moreover, if I defined it as visual poetry, wouldn’t consistency compel me to include comic books, cartoons, illustrated poems–any combination of texts and graphics, in fact–in my visual poetry category? I thought it would. So I added a third category to vizlature. I named it “illuscriptation” at first, then “illuscription.” The difference between an illuscription and a visual poem seemed easy enough to pin down: the first’s visual elements were separate from its textual elements whereas the second’s were fused with its textual elements. 

 

My taxonomizing gained momentum from that point on. Soon I was distinguishing visual poetry from “visually-enhanced poetry,” which is poetry printed in a manner that increases its ability to please but does not significantly amplify its core meaning; a poem written in a beautiful calligraphy would be an example, or a poem whose initial letter is in color and perhaps made into a picture as in certain illuminated manuscripts. So I decreed that the visual part of a visual poem had to work metaphorically with its verbal part. When this proved unwieldy, I backed down (though I continue to believe that most of the best visual poetry is visio-textually metaphoric). My definition of visual poetry became: poetry containing visual elements that are fused with, and approximately as expressively consequential as, its verbal elements.

For several years I was content with my four categories of vizlature: visually-enhanced poetry, visual poetry, illuscription and textual illumagery. Recently, though, “illuscription” became problematic. First of all, it covered too much that was clearly not poetry (like cartoons); it also covered visio-textual collages that almost everyone in the field called visual poetry; and it covered poems (illustrated poems) that no one considered visual poetry. Consequently, I decided to use it as my term for comic books, comic strips and cartoons only, and re-assign the poetries I had been calling illuscription to some other category of vizlature. I decided there were just two poetries to re-assign: (1) illustrated poetry, whose name should be self-explanatory, and (2) poetry containing but not fused with aesthetically consequential visual elements–which I named “visiocollagic poetry” because it is so often a kind of collage. The former I put in my visually-enhanced poetry category, the latter in my visual poetry category.Since I had previously considered only vizlature whose visual and textual elements were fused to be visual poetry, I now needed a name to distinguish such poetry from its new partner in the visual poetry category. I dubbed it “visualloyic poetry,” the adjective being a combination of “visual” and “alloy.”

“Visualloyic” and “visiocollagic” are stumbly long names but it shouldn’t matter much as it’s unlikely they’ll be used by anyone but connoisseurs and similar specialists. For such persons, however, they should be useful. Of course, if anyone were to come up with better names for these–or any of the other awkwardly-named poetries in my taxonomy–I’d be delighted.One other task I had to take care of was naming illustrated poetry’s now nameless partner in the visually-enhanced poetry category–the kind costumed in purely-decorative calligraphy or the like. I was straight-forward this time, naming it “typographically-heightened poetry.”

So involved did I get with my definitions and neologies that I finally recognized that the textual and visual elements of many pieces that even I at my most rigorous termed visual poems were not truly fused as I claimed they should be in such poems. The Padin piece below illustrates the problem. The hand depicted in it is not fused with its words although it is unarguably an intimate part of the sentences the poem half-spells (such as the amusing one about the unfortunate miscompletion of the delicate “idea” with a letter from the leaden “word”; or, going in an opposite direction, the one about how precisely the creative hand must place each letter to build something viable out of language). Ergo, I refined my definition of visual poetry to: poetry containing visual elements that are fused or otherwise clearly integrated with, and approximately as expressively consequential as, its verbal elements. 

 

As for textual illumagery, I now divide it into textualloyic illumagery and textcollagic illumagery, to parallel visualloyic and visiocollagic poetry. Textualloyic illumagery is art consisting of averbal textual matter that is fused or otherwise clearly integrated with its visual matter. (It can also contain verbal textual matter that is obviously of no semantic significance like a cut-out from a newspaper shaped to represent a man, the particular words in the news-stories having no real relevance–they’re just there to indicate that the man is composed of language, or of news, or whatever.) Textcollagic illumagery, like visiocollagic poetry, is visio-textual art whose visual and textual elements are separate from one another. It differs from visiocollagic poetry only inasmuch as its textual elements are averbal.

I continue not to warm to the idea of counting textual illumagery as visual poetry, but it seems few in the field are going along with me. And there is some sense in the argument that the textual elements of such art put an aesthcipient significantly in the verbal part of his mind as well as the visual: by providing a verbal ambience, and by being pronounceable (or nearly so), and in discussing language if not quite becoming it. So my position now is neutral: I offer textual illumagery as a form of vizlature and leave it up to the rest of the world (albeit mainly those working in vizlature as poets and/or critics, I hope) to decide whether it ought to be considered visual poetry.To round off my system, I include under vizlature a category which is for text-containing visual art that is not textual enough to be textual illumagery what my visually-enhanced poetry category is to graphics-involved poetry that is not graphic enough to be visiocollagic or visualloyic poetry: infoscriptioned illumagery. The adjective in that term comes from “infoscription,” my term for such things as captions, titles, labels and comic-strip dialogue-balloons (which can be considered elaborate labels for drawn characters’ speech). To put it simply, infoscriptioned illumagery is visual art that has labels or the like affixed that are basically informational rather than expressive. So a painting of a streetscene with the names of stores displayed, making it textual, would not be a specimen of textual illumagery.

Going the other way–to a taxonomical level above visual poetry, that is–I’ve set up the category, “pluraesthetic poetry,” for poetry that breaks expressive decorum by making more or less as much, and as important, use of one or more other expressive modalities than the verbal such as mathematics, music or visual art. It would exclude infoscriptioned illumagery as not poetry but cover everything else mentioned (unless it were agreed that textual illumagery were not poetry, either). Higher up in my system there’s “Burstnorm Poetry,” followed by Poetry, then Literature–which completes my taxonomy as far as vizlature is concerned. Needless to say, my taxonomy is not perfect. Not only are some of the names of its categories less than sonorous or memorable, but the sheer number of sub-divisions in it multiplies what bp Nichol called “border blur” to make subjective guesswork hard to avoid. What, for example, is a Grummaniacal Taxonomist to make of the following piece by W. Mark Sutherland?

 

This gave me all kinds of trouble. In a way, it’s just a picture of forks, with a peculiar label (plus a title), which would make it infoscriptioned illumagery. But the (to me, brilliant/hilarious) point of the piece is the abruptly “mathocentric” refusal of the label to finish, preferring to mispell what is of mathematical significance in the picture than to say what it depicts, and that depends on something visual, the absence of a letter. That absence could be just verbal–except that it wouldn’t be noticed if it didn’t happen in a designated frame, under a picture that seems to expect a fourth letter to finish naming it. The text and graphics of the piece assuredly work together to produce its main aesthetic/philosophical meaning–and do so integratedly. Therefore, in spite of first appearing to be too secondarily textual to even be textual illumagery, then–fleetingly–seeming perhaps visiocollagic, it finally proves to be a visualloyic poem . . . in my expert but subjective opinion.

 

Far easier to classify is jwcurry’s “LINE 4.” It is almost surely a deteriorated poem of some kind but now illegible. It is therefore a textual illumage–to be precise, a textualloyic illumage–whose subject is the disintegration of texts, or poems, or language, or whatever (bringing to mind Ozymandias, among other things). Or maybe it is about language slowly coming to life.

 

Similarly, the arresting “review” of (or response to) b. dedora’s he moved, which is also by curry, is a textualloyic illumage–which suggests interesting things about fading-or- congealing bits of language, in contrast with an established “word” (the “bihhh”).

 

But then there’s Mark Laba’s snark piece, which seemed similarly textual but not verbal to me. In another essay I said the following about it, “If some critic can paraphrase its verbal fore-burden and show how that connects with its visual matter, I’ll (ahem) allow it to be called a visual poem, but for now it looks to be a textual illumage to me.” Luigi-Bob Drake took up the challenge. Here’s what he said in an e.mail letter to me: “th top level, in stenciled letters, reads: “skitzofrenia is an i for eye”. schizophrenia is “misspelled”, with the substitutued “skit” homophone emphasizing the dramatic (as well as praps role-playing?) aspect of th clinical imbalance referred to. ‘skitzo-frenia’ is also partially obscured, whited out, as many schizophrenics attempt to hide or deny their condition–and as society, too, is apt in some circumstances to be in denial ov mental illness.

“next, visual cues, in the form ov the arrows, are given to force the vertical reading of ‘is’ ‘an’–an ‘unnatural’ direction, as well as a disjunction of the ‘ia’ from it’s preceeding word; in both aspects, the mode of perception is not the normal one, with iconic visuals taking precedence over traditional reading (thinking) habits. this leads to the last line, in which visual perception (“eye”) is somehow in transaction with the self (“I”) of the poem–traded for? substituted? or in place of? it suggests, to me, that th ‘I’, th schizoprhic subject ov the poem, has lost his ‘self’, or her vision of’ ‘self’, perhaps overwhelmed by perceptions too chaotic or distorted to be intepreted…

“But what ov the Snark, in the background level of the poem? obviously referring to the Lewis Carroll poem, in which the crew goes off in search of the elusive creature, only to find that the particular Snark they are hunting is in fact a ‘Boojum’–and coming upon a Boojum, ov course, leads to one’s own disappearance, as the hapless Baker finds out at the end of the poem. the hunt for the snark, and the resulting disappearance of the self, echoes th subject’s search for sense in a visual realm & loss of sense of self w/in the disease. when the Baker disappears, he’s in the process of saying ‘it’s a boojum’ but only gets out the first syllable of the last word–his final ‘”oooo…’ echoed in the background here, as well as echoing praps a cry of pain & loneliness that is so symptomatic of schizophrenia…”

So: the work is a visual poem, after all–a visualloyic one. And now that I’ve finally brought this essay into a patch of words by someone who knows what he’s talking about, I think it’s a good time to end it.
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