A ROUGH DRAFT
If you for some reason were consumed with a need to use any means whatever, however suspect, to win adherents to the premise that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon did not write the works attributed to him, it would be near-impossible for you to do a better job of it than Diana Price did with her book of 2001, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography.
Needless to say, it would be futile to try to convince Price’s admirers of this, none of them minimally blessed with critical sense. Still, I feel an analysis of her propagandistic techniques in order—as a contribution to the study of what I call Phobosophy, the excessive hatred of truth. Hence, what follows.
Price had her work cut out when she decided to go after Will (as I will hereafter refer to the man from Stratford, to distinguish him from the Earl of Oxford and the many others to whom anti-Stratfordians, as they have come to call themselves, claim the name, “William Shakespeare,” refers). For one thing, there is the fairly large amount of hard evidence (by most scholars’ standards) that Will was the poet he’s always said to have been. Perhaps nearly as important, is the complete lack of hard evidence that he was not.
Little of the authorship evidence for Will had much effect on those who first tried to discredit him, beginning in 1850 with Delia Bacon, over 200 years after Will died.1 The earliest of these had more excuse for their delusions than Price, for it wasn’t until the twentieth century that much of the authorship evidence for Will became generally known, and a good amount had not been uncovered till then or later.
From the outset, though, it had been known that Will’s name was on the title-pages of something like forty books published in his lifetime, beginning with Venus and Adonis in 1593. Moreover, the famous collection of his plays in the “First Folio” of 1623 also had his name on its title-page. That there were official records of his birth, wedding and death, as well as of the births of his children, prevented anyone from arguing that the name was fictitious. Ergo, even the most fanatical of the anti-Stratfordians recognized the Shakespearean title-page-name as something they had to deal with.
Some of them used the many ways Will’s last name was spelled to argue it was really “Shagspur” or the like, but not “Shakespeare,” the True Author’s name. (They kept silent about its having been unarguably spelled “Shakespeare” on several documents, including the deed for New Place, the house Will bought in the late 1590s and lived the rest of his life in). But too many names of the time were spelled in two or more different ways (even by some naming themselves!) for this argument to work for any but the blindest authorship skeptics. A more effective tactic against the title-page name was needed.
No problem. I don’t know who invented it, but nearly all the early anti-Stratfordians were soon employing what I am dubbing the “Clothed-Name Shakespeare-Elimination Rule” against the title-page name. It simply stated that no name on a document counted as meaningful authorship evidence unless “clothed” by accompanying corroboration such as the place of residence or date of birth of the person named. “William Shakespeare” on a book’s title-page, unclothed, was thus not meaningful evidence that Will wrote the book, but “William Shakespeare of Stratford” or “W. Shakspere, player with the King’s Men” would be. Insane? Political correctness forbids me from saying one way or the other.
Not that I would ever disagree that a book’s title-page name alone is insufficient to prove the one named wrote the book. But I have trouble understanding why anti-Stratfordians dismiss a title-page name alone as evidentiarily irrelevant. True, few of them, if pressed, would deny that Will’s name on a book’s title-page is indeed evidence that he wrote the book, but they certainly act and write as though it were not.
Be that as it may, over the years the original version of the “Clothed-Name Shakespeare-Elimination Rule” against Will failed too often for authorship skeptics to remain comfortable with it. The monument to Shakespeare in his hometown church speaks of him as a poet and gives his date of death and age at the time, for instance. And Leonard Digges refers to that Will’s monument, and its location in Stratford, as well as to Will’s acting career, in a poem in the First Folio praising him as a poet. In short, the rule needed to be improved upon.
The anti-Stratfordians were up to the challenge. Before long, a chronologically-enhanced rule evolved. It disqualified not only a unclothed name as authorship evidence, but a clothed one not employed while the person apparently named was living! This was a brilliantly effective device because, by chance, there was for a long time almost no known clothed references to Will as an author that were contemporary evidence, as Price came to call it—and none that any anti-Stratfordian would consider very formidable.
There was some, though. It was not very straight-forward, consisting not of clear-cut single pieces of evidence, but of clusters of evidence. Will’s bequests to his fellow actors Condell, Heminges and Burbage in his will, for example, contributed to one such cluster. It made him William Shakespeare the actor. You could complete the cluster by turning, for example, to The Return from Parnassus, Part II, a play performed at Cambridge University around 1600. That’s because a character in the play who represents William Shakespeare the actor is referred to as a poet. That, of course, made Will = actor = poet.
Other similar evidentiary clusters do the same. They fail to nail down Will’s having been the True Author as unarguably as the monument or Digges’s poem does, but there is contemporary evidence that does do that: the handful of references to Shakespeare the poet in which he is given the honorific “Mr.” Since Will was the only William Shakespeare in England during his lifetime who was qualified to use this honorific (so far as we know), these instances of “Mr.” render the second version of the Shakespeare-elimination Rule” as ineffective as the first. They have become part of the case for Will only very recently, however, so it is understandable that so few of the anti-Stratfordians have dealt with it. I recall no mention of it in Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, for instance.
Still, it was no doubt clear to Price that a new Shakespeare-elimination mechanism was again needed. It is here that she burst into the forefront of anti-Stratfordianism. What got her there was a truly brilliant variation on what authorship skeptics before her had done to rescue the original Shakespeare-elimination rule. Whereas they ruled that a name needed not only to be clothed but contemporary, she came up with the proposition that even a contemporary clothed name was of miniscule value as authorship evidence if not penned by someone personally acquainted with the one named! The evidence, in other words, had to be both contemporary and personal!
To make her improved version of the rule maximally effective, Price has always kept from explicitly, and rigorously defining what she means by the “personal authorship evidence” so vital to it. Not that she doesn’t at times provide vague partial descriptions of it (as opposed to definitions), but her descriptions apply only to certain kinds of it, not to all the many kinds there might be. (Tip: propagandists never adequately define their terms, assuming they even bother to define them, at all, since to do so would prevent them from contradicting them when they need to).
However, according to what she told me during one Internet exchange, she considers that simply mentioning evidentiary items referred to along the way as “personal” is all a scholar needs do to indicate what personal authorship evidence is. In other words, she need not worry about getting into messy, often hard to defend, particulars about anything she wants to consider personal authorship evidence.
Price was lucky with her new rule, for she was able to turn up 24 authors of the time whose authorship was–or could be shown by artifice to have been—supported by “contemporary personal evidence,” as it has come to be known.
Let me add that one minor characteristic was also needed—the evidence had to be “literary.” Price, of course, doesn’t explicitly define what she means by this (see above) but she generally means a reference explicitly identifying a person as a writer. But it can also mean someone involved with something she considers literary, like owning a book. Nonetheless, her use of the term is quite a bit more fair than the majority of her other tactics.
Bottom line: with the introduction of personalness of authorship evidence, Price had a Shakespeare-elimination rule she and her colleagues could use against Will based on the absence of “CPLE,” “contemporary personal literary evidence,” or what I will henceforth be calling “Pricean Evidence.” Employing it, she could show that there were 24 Elizabethan/Jacobean authors for whom evidence she considered crucial existed that did not exist for Will!
A lesser propagandist than Price would have been satisfied, but not Price. Ever-resourceful, she came up with a scintillating improvement: subdividing her evidence into ten kinds! That done, she could name 24 authors of Will’s time for whom TEN different kinds of evidence existed, not even ONE of which existed for Will!
Hence, Price includes a “Chart of Literary Paper Trails” in her book’s appendix. About it, she says, “Just as birds can be distinguished from turtles by characteristics peculiar to the species, so writers can be distinguished from doctors, actors. or financiers, by the types of personal records left behind. This chart . . . compares personal and literary records left by Elizabethan and Jacobean writers during their lifetimes, with at least one record extant for any category checked.” The chart’s headings are as follows:
(1) “Evidence of formal education”
(2) “Record of correspondence, especially concerning literary matters”
(3) “Evidence of having been paid to write”
(4) “Evidence of a direct relationship-to a patron”
(5) “Extant original manuscript”
(6) “Handwritten inscriptions, receipts, letters, etc., touching on literary matters”
(7) “Commendatory verses, epistles, or epigrams contributed or received”
(8) “Miscellaneous records (e.g., referred to personally as a writer)”
(9) “Evidence of having been in possession of a book”
(10) “Notice at death as a writer.”
Now let’s go through these again, this time with my comments:
(1) “Evidence of formal education”
As far as I’m concerned, formal education has nothing to do with being a writer since one can learn to read and write in the home—from a neighbor if one’s parents are illiterate. It has certainly been done. I see no reason that the ability to read and write combined with innate intelligence of the right sort should not suffice to make a writer of a person, even a writer at the level of a Shakespeare. But I can’t think of a great writer who had no formal education, so I guess this category has to stand as very weak evidence of a career as a writer–very weak because many non-writers have had formal education.
(2) “Record of correspondence, especially concerning literary matters”
That a person has written or received letters is, of course, ridiculously weak evidence he is a writer—unless one of the letters involved contains matter indicating he is.
(3) “Evidence of having been paid to write”
This seems too much like the next heading to merit a comment by itself.
(4) “Evidence of a direct relationship to a patron”
A person’s having been paid for something he’s written is unquestionable evidence the person is a writer. So is having a literary patron. But how is one different enough from the other to have its own category? Why, in fact, shouldn’t both kinds of evidence of payment go with (2) into one simple category for “personal evidence that others knowing a person considered him a writer?” Except propagandistically to multiply the kinds of evidence Will lacks.
(5) “Extant original manuscript”
This is about the best possible evidence of authorship, and clearly “personal.” It is also sufficiently different from, and stronger, personal evidence by any standard for authorship than the previous kinds of evidence listed, so deserving placement in a separate category.
(6) “Handwritten inscriptions, receipts, letters, etc., touching on literary matters”
One can’t deny such items in the hand of a person are evidence that he is a writer—if touching on a literary career rather than merely on literary matters. That they are a writer’s own personal evidence for a literary career distinguishes them sufficiently from evidence of that provided by others, it seems to me, for their placement in a category of their own. It would make sense, however (scholarly sense, that is, not propagandistic sense), to include letters from (2) written by a person himself about his literary career in this category, and put similar letters to him in the category I’ve already suggested for “evidence that others knowing a person considered him a writer.”
I also wonder if such items should share a category for “documents in the subject’s hand showing him to have been a writer” with “extant original manuscript?”
(7) “Commendatory verses, epistles, or epigrams contributed or received”
Another category whose only purpose is clearly propagandistic multiplication of evidence that seems missing for Will. A genuine attribution scholar would split the items in it between a category for “evidence that others knowing a person considered him a writer” and one begun by (6), which I would label “items written by himself indicating a person has a literary career.”
Note that Price’s heading does not include prefaces and the like. I suspect Price knew that mentioning them would risk reminding people of Will’s prefaces to his two narrative poems. More on those later.
(8) “Miscellaneous records (e.g., referred to personally as a writer)”
Price was obviously desperate to have ten categories of evidence she felt she could convince the gullible is not extant for Will when she came up with this category.
(9) “Evidence of books owned, written in, borrowed, or given”
It is, of course, absurd to count possession of a book as evidence of authorship. But I would accept hard evidence that a person never had possession of a book as strong evidence against his having been a writer, so possession of a book would count as evidence a person was not disqualified to be a writer. Of course, owning a pencil or other means of producing writing would do the same thing.
(10) “Notice at death as a writer.”
What would make notice of death as a writer merit a separate category from any other reference to a person as a writer? Except that perhaps the anti-Stratfordians’ all-time favorite argument against Will is that no one said nothin’ about his death until (according to them) he’d long been gone. And the need to hit the magic ten.
Price also needed the category to give Marlowe, one of the 24 writers besides Shakespeare on her list, an extra item, for he has very few, and all of them are questionable. Interestingly, however, the only notice of Marlowe’s death is a eulogy by George Peele that does not indicate that Peele knew Marlowe personally.
* * *
So, how many legitimate categories would a responsibly revised Pricean chart have? The following four, only, as far as I’m concerned (albeit I’ve included subcategories with them for the sake of clarification):
Personal Evidence Establishing a Person as a Writer:
(1) Secondary Evidence that the person might have been a writer
a. evidence of the person’s formal education
b. evidence of the person’s having been in possession of a book
(2) Documents identifying the person as a writer by others who also indicate they are personally acquainted with him
a. evidence of the person’s having received money for writing
b. letters, diary entries, or the like by others identifying him as a writer
c. published commendatory verses, epistles, or epigrams identifying the person as a writer by other writers who also indicate a personal relationship with him
(3) Published commendatory verses, epistles, or epigrams by the person to other writers he identifies as personal acquaintances of his
This one I wasn’t sure of because such documents would not be personal by Price’s standards, as I understand them, because only having the person’s name on them, not his date of birth or the like. But I figured Price needed help, so am including it.
(4) Documents in the person’s hand indicative of a literary career
a. extant original manuscripts
b. handwritten inscriptions, receipts, letters, etc., indicating a literary career
Now, then, how does Will compare with others on Price’s list as I now have it? Well, according to her, he would get a zero, while most of the rest got three or four. Two–as I, not Price–would evaluate the evidence for them, would get just one, and two just two.
But I think Shakespeare does as well as Marlowe, whose treatment by Price is particularly devious. She counts a letter of Thomas Kyd’s to Lord Keeper Puckering stating that Marlowe wrote for a lord’s players which was written after Marlowe died (i.e., is not contemporary, by her standards), so shouldn’t be counted by her. Price uses this letter in two categories, by the way! And she describes it as being to Puckering in only one, disguising the fact that she was using it twice (inadvertently, I’m sure).
She also counts a letter from Robert Sidney to Burghley saying that Marlowe professed himself to be a scholar as evidence that Marlowe was a writer, but a scholar need not be a writer, so is ambiguous and shouldn’t be part of the evidence recorded in Price’s filter.
I’ve already discussed the flaws as personal evidence of the tribute George Peele wrote to Marlowe. For obvious propagandistic reasons, Price waives the need for authors of notices of death to somewhere in their notices indicate they knew the deceased to count as personal. Conclusion: by Price’s standards, Marlowe scores no better on my revised Pricean chart than Will.
Furthermore, Will comes very close to winning evidence in all four categories. There’s the book of the times discovered with his name written on its title-page, Archaionomia; we can’t be sure the signature is his, but it does look like his other signatures, and it can’t be summarily rejected for not having belonged to him. In fact, he was involved in a fairly extensive law case in a venue presided over by William Lambarde, the author of Arachaionomia, so it is not stretching things too drastically to consider it possible he met Lambarde and bought his book, or was given a copy, as a result. That would give him an entry in (1).
And what about the library his son-in-law had, presumably while Shakespeare was alive? Is it likely Shakespeare never touched one of those books? His close friend Thomas Quiney had a library, too. Was it off-limits to Will?
Note: Price claims he was a play-broker. Could he have been a play broker without ever touching a book (or the equivalent of one like a play manuscript)?
If we assume Southampton was Shakespeare’s patron as any objective scholar has to, he has an entry in (2a).
Many scholars accept the Thomas More fragment as Shakespeare’s, and if we do, too, it gives him an entry in (4). I confess I can’t find any evidence that would qualify Will for an entry in (3), though. So he’s only three for four. Possibly.
Preliminary Conclusions:
Price’s Shakespeare-Elimination Filter, which I feel I can no longer continue to call a “chart,” is wholly dependent on absence of evidence. Given that all the extant evidence supports his authorship, this is not surprising. One driven to dismantle him can only babble, as anti-Stratfordians have been babbling since Delia Bacon’s day, about all the gaps in the evidentiary record–or what Price terms “the literary paper trail.” She pretends to have shown such a trail wholly absent for Will.
As I have shown, though, the paper trail that’s absent is one that has been incredibly narrowly defined. All kinds of evidence connects his name to a writing career but is faulted for failure to:
(1) connect to his hometown or the like as well;
(2) have been recorded during his lifetime;
(3) have been supplied by a person indicating he personally knew him;
(4) have been explicitly personal.
(4) may be the greatest of Price’s master-strokes, for it allows her to ignore the copious amount of authorship evidence for Shakespeare that may well be personal, such as–well, any of the title-page names since there’s no reason the printer responsible for type-setting, or his boss, might not have personally known Shakespeare. Wonderfully devious, too, is that never in her book does Price mention the possibility of a hierarchy of Pricean Evidence; for her, it would seem, a piece of such evidence is either 100% personal, or it is impersonal.
But what Price does by multiplying the number of her chart’s categories to broaden the literary paper trails of other writers of Will’s time, most of them tiny, and some practically invisible, is an admirable stroke, too.
Then there’s a ploy I haven’t yet mentioned: her failure once, as far as I know, to consider anything that might explain why certain kinds of evidence are extant for a given group of writers among her 24 but not for Will. An excellent example is “record of payment for writing” which 14 of Price’s 24 have–but eight of them are from Henslowe’s diaries, which are almost the only source of most records of payments to playwrights from the time, and only mention them after Shakespeare was writing for his own company, and not for Henslowe (as he probably had previously).
Another ignored factor is that Shakespeare was basically an actor who wrote plays for his company, and thus interacted with other writers, and patrons, less than Price’s other 24–and made out well enough financially without the help of patrons to need to scurry after them the way those other writers had to (after almost certainly gaining Southampton’s patronage, however unlikely Price contends he did).
Finally, Price seems never to consider that it is absurd to expect any of the kinds of documents she is concerned with to be more than very randomly and haphazardly extant because of their chronological context (1600, give or take 30 years)—which was not only long ago but a time when there was almost no interest in literary biography.
* * *
For the rest of this essay, I will attempt to show how a genuine scholar would chart the actual personal authorship evidence for Shakespeare—assuming any scholar would focus on personal evidence alone (by any definition), and I don’t know that any ever has.
My chart has nine categories:
(A) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime That Is Beyond Reasonable Doubt Personal
(B) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime That Is Almost Certainly Personal
(C) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime That Is Probably Personal
(D) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime Slightly More Likely Than Not To Be Personal
(E) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime Equally Likely to Be Personal or Not Personal
(F) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime Slightly More Likely Than Not Not To Be Personal
(G) Literary Evidence That Is Probably Not Personal
(H) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime That Is Almost Certainly Not Personal
(I) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime That Is Beyond Reasonable Doubt Not Personal
Any fair-minded anti-Stratfordian, and there are a few, will have to admit that such divisions are more revealing, if less propagandistically effective, than the simple black&white personal/impersonal ones that Price uses. Not all the consequential evidence is so easily classified of as she pretends.
I also differ from Price in that I use “personal” to mean “testimony by someone who can be shown beyond reasonable doubt to have personally known the person he is testifying about.” My impression is that Price misuses the term to mean only “testimony by someone who states as he gives it that he personally knows the person he is testifying about.” (I should add that she is not fastidious about sticking to this definition when it suits her agenda not to.) I must add that the only reason I am solely concerned with evidence from the lifetime of the alleged writer concerned is that that is all she is concerned with, not because it’s sane. Nor will I fudge things so I can use evidence from after his death when convenient, as she does.
(A) Literary Evidence from Shakespeare’s Lifetime That Is Beyond Reasonable Doubt Personal
This category is for the most unarguably certain evidence a writer could leave behind, such as signed, holographic manuscripts, or letters in the hand of an alleged writer concerning his writing. I found none for Shakespeare. There is none for a substantial minority of the 24 writers in Price’s study, either, and only scraps for almost all the rest.
(B) Literary Evidence That Is Almost Certainly Personal from Shakespeare’s Lifetime
(1) the dedication to Venus and Adonis, 1593, and
(2) dedication to The Rape of Lucrece
(3) Francis Meres’s Testimony
(4) Sir George Buc’s Testimony
(5) Thomas Heywood’s Testimony
(1) is a writer’s personal statement that he wrote the poem, Venus and Adonis, to which is affixed William Shakespeare’s name. Or else it’s a lie, but that could be said about anything–such as, to take for one example among scores, Philip Massinger’s commendatory words to his “judicious and learned friend the Author” James Shirley. How can we take Massinger to be telling the truth without doing the same for Shakespeare?
The V&S dedication is also, in effect, the testimony of its publisher, Richard Field, that William Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis. Since it is near-certain that Field personally knew William Shakespeare, because: (i) their fathers knew each other, Shakespeare’s father having appraised the inventory of Richard’s father’s will sometime around 1590; (ii) Richard and William were from the same small town of some 1500 to 2000 inhabitants, and close enough in age that they would have gone to the same one-classroom school together; (iii) both had literary interests, even if we assume William was only an actor; and (iv) William had a character in Cymbeline, needing a false name, use the pseudonym Richard du Champ, French for “Richard Field.”
Several other writers left records stating that William Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis, and there is no good evidence that he did not write both it and its dedication.
(2), for a poem that came after Venus and Adonis by a year, is personal literary evidence from his lifetime not only for the same three reasons Shakespeare’s previous dedication is, but for a subtle fourth reason: it includes implicitly but near-certainly the personal testimony for Shakespeare of a third witness. It states that Shakespeare had a “warrant” from Southampton, which most reasonable people take to have been patronage, won by Venus and Adonis.
That Southampton liked that poem is close to unarguable because Shakespeare had said in his first dedication that he would not compose a second poem if Southampton did not like the first, and here we have a second poem from him. Whatever the “warrant” was, though, Shakespeare got it, and it had to be delivered to him. One would think Southampton himself personally gave it to him, but even if not—as anti-Stratfordians argue—someone had to give that warrant to Shakespeare in person, as a writer. In other words, either Southampton recognized Shakespeare in person as a writer or his go-between did.
(3) is Francis Meres’s 1598 published praise of Shakespeare that refers to “his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends, etc.” How would Meres know about the sonnets among Shakespeare’s private friends without being a private friend himself—or by knowing a private friend who was thus a go-between personally recognizing Shakespeare as a poet (and telling Meres about him) the same way the deliverer of the warrant mentioned in the Lucrece dedication was?
(4) has to do with the discovery by Alan Nelson of an annotation in the hand of George Buc (1560-1622) in the Folger Shakespeare Library copy of a play called George a Greene that says the play was “Written by ………… a minister, who ac[ted] the pin{n}ers part in it himself. Teste W. Shakespea[re]” Ergo, George Buc knew Shakespeare personally, which makes the following Stationers Register entry of Nov. 26, 1607 that refers to “A booke called Master William Shakespeare his historye of Kinge Lear.” Note, by the way, how neatly the “Master” substantiates the identification of the author with the only Shakespeare of the time entitled to that honorific.
(5) is from Thomas Heywood’s “Epistle to the printer after An Apology for Actors” (1612) in which he protests “a manifest injury” done him by the publisher William Jaggard. The injury was Jaggard’s printing two poems by Heywood and attributing them to Shakespeare, whom he says he knows to have been much offended with Jaggard for having “presumed to make so bold with his name.” Heywood thus has to be claiming his personal acquaintance with the poet Shakespeare. Heywood, by the way, does not mention Shakespeare by name, but does mention the two poems Shakespeare’s name was falsely on. Ergo, Heywood had to have been referring to Shakespeare as the aouthor of those two poems. Price, of course, alleges that Heywood’s “wording is dense, filled with troublesome pronouns” and therefore can’t count as evidence for Shakespeare, but that is malarkey, as I have shown elsewhere in tedious detail.
(C) Literary Evidence That Is Probably Personal from Shakespeare’s Lifetime
(1) Greene’s Testimony
(2) Henry Chettle’s Testimony
(3) John Davies’s Testimony
(4) the impresa
(5) The Testimony of the Title-Pages
(1) is in Greene’s Groatsworth of Witte (1592), which states that someone the Groatsworth calls a “Shake-scene,” attributes a line from Henry VI, Part 3 (a play said to be his in the First Folio and not attributed to anyone else anywhere else), and claims conceitedly believed himself as good a composer of blank verse as Christopher Marlowe and two other playwriting associates of Greene’s, the probable author of the Groatsworth—although some believe Henry Chettle was). (See my essay on the Groatsworth for details.)
It seems to me that the Groatsworth’s author knew too much about the Shake-scene and despises him too much for him not to personally have run into him in the small theatrical world of London. But the evidence is not strong enough for me to call call the letter certainly personal.
2), Henry Chettle’s identification in his preface to Kind-Harts Dreame (1592) of Shakespeare as a playwright he has met in person and found to be a swell guy, is similarly probable but not certain evidence he knew him since he fails to give his name. But it is clear to most scholars that he was (for the reasons given in my Chettle essay).
(3) consists of three poems by John Davies of Hereford. The first, published in 1603, praises two actors, a W.S. and an R.B., almost surely Shakespeare and Burbage. Two years later he writes of an “R.B. and W.S.” in a poem, this one praising the first for acting and painting, and praising the other for acting and poetry. He knows a good deal about the two. I mention this to indicate the probability that he actually knew W.S. and R.B. personally, because of his fondness for actors in general, and them in particular.
Then in 1610, a more explicit poem by Davies about Shakespeare was published, calling him “Our English Terence” in the title, Terence being probably the Roman playwright most admired by the English then for his comedies. In the body of the poem, he speaks of Shakespeare’s reigning wit, and reveals his knowledge of comments about Shakespeare. This, for me, is suggestion enough that Davies personally knew Shakespeare, but the fact that the poem is one in a sequence of poems Davies wrote about various of his friends, all of them complimentary, though one or two are teasingly mocking, as well, makes it even more probable to me that Davies personally knew Shakespeare.
(4) is about a 1613 record (“Item, 31 Martii 1613 to Mr. Shakespeare in gold about my Lord’s impresa xlivs. To Richard Burbage for painting and making it, in gold xlivs.”) that seems fair evidence of a payment to Will Shakespeare, probably in person, for creating some kind of clever motto or the like of just the kind that Shakespeare the writer created so often in his plays to go with a painted image of just the kind that Burbage would have had the talent to take care of. What other Mr. Shakespeare might it have been? And I am reminded that I forgot to forward this as a near-certain piece of Pricean evidence for having been paid to write.
(5), the many title-pages of published plays and poems with Shakespeare’s name on them is obviously literary evidence that he wrote them. I consider them probably personal because it doesn’t seem possible to me that none of the many publishers who published his plays and testified that he wrote them by placing his name on their title-pages knew him personally.
Diana Price, in fact, is sure that nearly all of them knew him personally—except that they knew him only as a play-broker, not as a playwright. Nonetheless, if they knew him personally, their testimony on the title-pages of the books they published that he was the author of those books must be considered personal literary evidence according to her.
(D) Literary Evidence Slightly More Likely Than Not To Be Personal from Shakespeare’s Lifetime
(1) The Testimony of John Weever
(2) The Testimony of Antony Scoloker
(3) The Testimony of Leonard Digges
(1) consists of a sonnet by John Weever which appeared in his Epigrammes (1599):
According to E.A.J. Honigmann, “Weever made (this poem) a ‘Shakespearian’ sonnet; of around 160 epigrams in his collection, most of them between four and twenty lines in length, one, and only one, is fourteen lines long and rhymes abab, cdcd, efef, gg. This can only mean one thing – that Weaver had seen some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and wished to signal to others in the know that he had enjoyed this privilege.” That would make him one of the friends Shakespeare circulated his sonnets among. Pure speculation, yes, but not implausible, at all, so—for me—more likely than not to indicate a personal relationship.
(2) occurs in Antony Scoloker’s preface to “Diaphantus; or, the Passions of Love” (1604), where he writes: “(an epistle to the reader) should be like the Never-too-well read Arcadia, where the Prose and verce (Matters and Words) are like his Mistresses eyes, one still excelling another and without Co-rivall: or to come home to the vulgars Element, like Friendly Shakespeare’s Tragedies, where the Commedian rides, when the Tragedian stands on tip-toe: Faith it should please all, like Prince Hamlet.”
If Scoloker was referring to Shakespeare’s personality, his use of the adjective “friendly” to describe him would indicate that he personally knew him (or that someone else who personally knew him had told Skoloker he was friendly); but since Scoloker here could be referring to Shakespeare’s “friendly” style as a writer, I don’t feel I can assume that he knew Shakespeare the man. (There are two conflicting questions for me: why insert an adjective about a man’s disposition in a paragraph otherwise entirely about writing; and why use the adjective in front of Shakespeare’s name rather than in front of “tragedies” if it is supposed to describe the latter?)
(3) lines written by Leonard Digges comparing the sonnets of Lope de Vega to those of “our Will Shakespeare,” which is a pretty friendly way to refer to Shakespeare—and Digges was not only a close neighbor of Shakespeare’s in both Aldermarston and in London, his father-in-law was remembered by Shakespeare in his will, and served as one of the two overseers of that will. But Digges could have meant “England’s” by “our.” I’m also not sure that “Will” wasn’t the name everyone knew Shakespeare by, not just his friends. But given a choice between calling this piece of evidence personal or impersonal, I’d call it personal. Fortunately, with a sane way of arranging such items in a continuum, I don’t have to do that here—even if I’ve put it in the wrong category.
(E) Literary Evidence Equally Likely to Be Personal or Not Personal from Shakespeare’s Lifetime
This category would include just about all the literary evidence from Shakespeare’s lifetime that is not explicitly personal nor consigned to the preceding categories. I don’t believe there is any known piece of evidence for Shakespeare that can confidently be described as certainly or even probably impersonal. Edward Alleyn, for instance, referred to Shakespeare as a poet; was the reference personal? I, for one, would suspect it almost certainly was was since it seems unlikely two such important figures in the London theatre world of the time would not have met, but we lack sufficient data to say for sure one way or the other. The same seems true for all the other evidence for Shakespeare. So this category is the last on my nine that I will concern myself with here.
Final Conclusion
Price’s book is preposterously propagandistic in many other ways I hope someday to trace in order to provide a fuller compendium of propagandistic practices than this essay is. One can only shake one’s head in wonder at such genius wasted on nothing more than libeling a great poet–for it wasn’t enough to enable her to determine who the True Author was, if not him.
1 early on out of an excessive need for their hero to have had high social status (many of them eventually coming to believe him a prince unfairly denied his crown); later also because of “osmotiphobia,” or an excessive need to defend themselves from that possibility that anyone could achieve cultural greatness due to an ability to learn osmotically without a substantial amount of Properly Regimented Formal Education.
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