THE CASE AGAINST SHAKESPEARE, PART THREE: THE SECONDARY LOONEATIONS
The secondary looneations, it will be remembered, have to do with what anti-Stratfordians perceive as inexplicable absences in the records of others’ treatment of Shakespeare. I divide these absences into five main kinds:
(1) looneations of epistulatory reference, which have to do with the letters to or about him;
(2) looneations of literary reference, which have to do with poems, dedications, memoirs and the like that mention him;
(3) looneations of official reference, which have to do with how he is mentioned on official church, court or state documents;
(4) looneations of commercial reference, which have to do with how he is mentioned in the commercial records of the theatre world he was part of; and
(5) looneations of governmental interest, which have to do with the way the government treated him, particularly with regard to plays anti-Stratfordians consider to have contained satirical or even seditious material.
(1) looneations of epistulatory or similar documentary reference
It is true that there is no mention of Shakespeare as a writer in anyone’s correspondence or journals, etc., by such as:
(a) his children, grandchildren,and their families, including Shakespeare’s son-in-law, Dr. John Hall, who recorded personal details of many others in his medical journals, including Michael Drayton, a patient of his whom the doctor called “an excellent poet” (but did so—as few anti-Stratfordians will tell you—in a journal having to do entirely with his practice, and dating from after Shakespeare died);
(b) his schoolmates (assuming he went to school) who would surely have wanted to brag about having known him;
(c) His fellow villagers, including Thomas Greene, who lived for a while in his very house with him, was literary enough to have written a 350-line poem while he was a student, and was ideally placed to have become his Boswell;
(d) Michael Drayton, who lived near Stratford while Shakespeare was alive, and was a patient of Dr. Hall, his son-in-law.
Why didn’t any of them left behind documents that mention the Stratford man as a writer? Obvious, simple answer: why should they have? And, of course, if they had, why—after nearly 400 years—should we still have the documents? After all, we have very few letters or diaries from any Stratford contemporary of Shakespeare’s.
As for letters and the like concerned with any writers of the times, we have very few of those, either. Even Diana Price, bending over backwards to find as many such documents as she could by or to or concerned with any of the twenty-five presumed writers in her sample–excluding Shakespeare, needless to say–was unable to find any at all for nine of them, and what she turned up for most of the rest is scant and suspect.
We do have a small packet of correspondence that concerns Shakespeare, however. It is a fluke that we have even that. The reason we do is that Richard Quiney, a town official, was severely beaten by a group of drunken toughs in May 1602 because of his opposition to Sir Edward Greville’s attempt to enclose the town commons for sheep grazing. He died as a result of his injuries. Because some of his personal correspondence, including a letter that was addressed to Shakespeare but apparently never delivered, happened to be among the municipal records at the time, they were saved with them. It would appear that almost all the letters and related personal records we have of just about anybody came from such official records—e.g., most of Oxford’s letters were among Lord Burghley’s official records.
I might add that Thomas Greene wrote in his diary about letters he and the town council had written to Shakespeare, although these letters are no longer extant. To be specific, on 23 December 1614, Greene wrote: “Lettres wrytten one to Mr Manneryng another to Mr Shakspeare with almost all the companyes hands to eyther: I alsoe wrytte of myself to my Cosen Shakespeare the Coppyes of all our oathes made then alsoe a not of the Inconveyences wold grow by the Inclosure…”
Anti-Stratfordians knowing of this take it as evidence that Shakespeare could not have written the works attributed to him, naturally. I mean, how could anyone write more than two or three words in a letter about the Divine Author of Hamlet without mentioning his status as The Greatest Literary Genius of All-Time?
What they can never seem to grasp is that Shakespeare to most of his contemporaries was just an actor and no more interesting for that reason than his father’s having been a glover (or whatever he was). This was long before biographies of writers were being written, and television cameras pursuing the trivialiest of celebrities. In short, one or two letters or the like relating to Shakespeare in any capacity are all that could be reasonably expected to have come down to us from his Stratford relatives and acquaintances.
Even sillier is the requirement that Shakespeare of Stratford have been mentioned in letters as a writer or anything else by someone in the court for whom he acted many times, such as:
(f) Southampton and everyone in his family, whose archives were subjected to a seven-year examination by Charlotte Stopes
(g) William Cecil Burghley, Queen Elizabeth’s Prime Minister
(h) Queen Elizabeth
(i) King James
All I can say to this is, “Give me a break.” Or ask how many writers did any of these people mention in letters as writers?
(2) looneations of literary reference
These non-mentioners of Shakespeare in letters and other private papers also, for some reason, failed to mention him in published literary memoirs or poems, prefaces, etc. This seems unworthy of notice since they mention few other writers in them, but my opponents make much of it, so I suppose I have to deal with it.
To begin chronologically, it’s true no one mentioned Shakespeare as a writer in published works, even if only by name, before 1593 (when he was 29). Why this should raise any eyebrows considering that he had no works published before then is beyond me. Nor can I understand what is so remarkable about his age (29) at the time he published his first work. George Chapman, to mention only one of many Elizabethan writers who took a while to get published, was 34 when his first book came out. Yet he became one of the best-known classical scholars in England.
Next, according to the looneators, is the lack of eulogies to Shakespeare at the time of his death, considering how many they claim Beaumont, who died the same year, Spenser, and Ben Jonson got. The Beginner’s Guide on the Oxfordian web site goes so far as to state that “in an age of copious eulogies, none was forthcoming when William Shakspere died in Stratford.” This is an exaggeration, to say the least, for we know of at least twenty eulogies or the equivalent that were written in honor of Shakespeare during the first 25 years after he died:
(i) William Basse’s “On Mr. Wm. Shakespeare,” written sometime between 1616 and 1623. According to Kathman, “Basse’s poem circulated widely in manuscript, as evidenced by the fact that over two dozen seventeenth-century manuscript copies have survived.”
(ii) a poem by John Taylor, the Water Poet, in his The Praise of Hemp-seed (1620) that refers to Shakespeare as one among many famous dead English poets whose works will live forever.
(iii) The inscription on the monument to Shakespeare in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford, which was erected before the publication of the First Folio, which mentions it, in 1623.
(iv, v, vi and vii) four poems in the First Folio by Jonson, Leonard Digges, Hugh Holland and I. M., whom scholars believe to have been Digges’s friend James Mabbe.
(viii) A poem annotated to a copy of the First Folio that calls Shakespeare “The wittiest poet in the world,” written in a script common to the 1620’s.
(ix) an elegy appended to Michael Drayton’s Battaile of Agincourt (1627) that speaks of Shakespeare as having had “ . . . as smooth a comic vein,/ Fitting the sock, and in thy natural brain,/ As strong conception, and as clear a rage,/ As any one that traffick’d with the stage.”
(x, xi and xii) Three eulogies composed for The Second Folio of Shakespeare’s works (1632), including a famous one by John Milton.
(xiii) a poem by Thomas Heywood in his Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels (1635) that says, regarding the familiarity with which poets of the time were treated, that “Mellifluous Shakespeare, whose enchanting quill/ Commanded mirth or passion, was but Will.”
(xiv) Sir William D’Avenant’s ode entitled “In Remembrance of Master William Shakespeare,” which was part of his Madagascar, with other poems (1638).
(xv and xvi) two short poems entitled “To Shakespeare” and “To the same” that Thomas Bancroft wrote for his Two Books of Epigrammes, and Epitaphs (1639).
(xvii) an epigram entitled “To Mr. William Shake-spear” in the anonymous Wits Recreations (1640).
(xviii, xix and xx) three poems in the 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Poems by Leonard Digges, John Warren and someone unnamed.
But the looneators really want to know why there were no eulogies immediately after he died. They typically assume that because we have no printed eulogies to Shakespeare that were unquestionably dated to within a year or so of his death, there were no eulogies from that time to him. We, of course, don’t know that none were printed and subsequently lost. We certainly don’t know that none were written during that time. The high probability is that some, perhaps many, were.
Here’s what David Kathman says about that at his and Terry Ross’s website: “Printed eulogies in Shakespeare’s day were only for socially important people like nobility and church leaders; posthumous eulogies for poets circulated in manuscript, only reaching print years later, if at all.” Kathman goes on to say that Shakespeare had eulogies published sooner after his death than virtually any other English playwright of his time, and more of them than any but Ben Jonson 20 years later.
Take Francis Beaumont, for example. He was supposed by anti-Stratfordians to have been much more lauded upon his death than Shakespeare. But other than the record of his burial—in Westminster Abbey, in 1616—there is no mention in the records of his death until the poems by Taylor and Basse that mention Shakespeare. According to Kathman, “the first printed eulogy specifically for Beaumont was ‘An epitaph upon my dearest brother Francis Beaumont,’ in the posthumous edition of his brother Sir John Beaumont’s poems.” That did not come out until 1629.
Beaumont’s writing partner, John Fletcher, fared as “poorly,” no eulogies to him being published until 1639, fourteen years after his death. It wasn’t until thirteen years after Thomas Middleton died that he was eulogized. As for John Webster, now considered the best playwright of the generation after Shakespeare and Jonson, his death was never noticed, so scholars still don’t know when he died. Similarly, John Ford disappeared from the literary record in 1639 without a trace.
There seems not to have been any literary reference to the death of John Marston in 1634, either– or of Thomas Heywood in 1641. Henry Chettle’s date of death is murky, too, although Thomas Dekker wrote a pamphlet that mentioned his being dead. Of all the playwrights active before Shakespeare, Marlowe and Greene were the only ones whose deaths drew any publicity to speak of. That should come as no surprise. Greene was a best-seller, as well as a controversial pamphleteer, who died young, in colorfully miserable circumstances. Marlowe, notorious as an atheist and homosexual (though it isn’t entirely certain that he was either), was killed at the age of only 29 in a drinking party brawl. Even so, both drew as many attacks as eulogies—and neither equaled Shakespeare in number or quickness of homage.
Ben Jonson, however, not only equalled him but surpassed him. Jonsonus Viribus, a volume of elegies honoring him, was published within a year of his death, in fact. But that was 21 years after Shakespeare’s death, when the professional theatre’s respectability had much increased, thanks in part to Jonson’s own Works—and no doubt also to the two editions of Shakespeare’s plays. Then, too, Jonson was much more an outward-going self-promoter than Shakespeare seems to have been.
Even so, according to Kathman, “the volume of tributes to Jonson nearly didn’t come off. Doctor Brian Duppa, the Dean of Christchurch, had been gathering manuscript elegies for Jonson, but Sir Kenelm Digby had to write Duppa to urge that the collection be printed, or else it would have followed previous custom and remained in manuscipt.
“But,” one can hear the looneators complain, “Shakespeare was a poet, as well as a dramatist, and should have been honored for that side of his accomplishents, if playwriting was truly disdained. It is true that non-dramatic poets were sometimes highly honored in Shakespeare’s time—but only when they were aristocrats, or the equivalent.
The two most honored poets of the era were Sir Philip Sidney and John Donne, both were high in the social order, and Sidney was a national war hero. Both would surely have been widely eulogized even if they’d never written any poetry at all. Indeed, hardly any of the first eulogies to Sidney mention his poetry.
As for Donne, he didn’t die until 1631, and was famous as a churchman and Dean of St. Paul’s. He was first eulogized by two ecclesiastics, in a small volume containing his last sermon that was published a year after he died. The year after that, his collected poems appeared—with ten eulogies, but they were generally more concerned with his reputation as a learned preacher than as a poet.
Other social high-ranking writers of poetry who were eulogized upon their deaths more than Shakespeare was include such as Sir John Beaumont, a courtier rather than a play-maker, and Fulke Greville, another prominent courtier and, by the time he died, a lord. Oxford, oddly, seems never to have been eulogized as a writer. As for poets whose social standing was lower, they appear to have been treated much more like common playwrights when they died.
Even the one counted by the Elizabethans as their greatest poet, the civil servant Edmund Spenser, received on his death in 1599 just (to quote from Kathman) “a poem by John Weever in 1599; a poem by Nicholas Breton, a Latin epitaph by William Camden, and a non-elegiac poem by Francis Thynne in 1600; a Latin poem by Charles Fitzgeoffrey in 1601 that doesn’t actually refer to Spenser’s death; three references to the death of ‘Collin’ (Spenser’s alter ego) in 1602-03; a two-line Latin poem by John Stradling in 1607; a couple of other passing references to Spenser in the past tense; and nothing else in the ten-year span after Spenser’s death.”
England’s Poet Laureate under Elizabeth, Samuel Daniel, got only one printed eulogy. Michael Drayton, who was a very popular poet in his time, died too unmentioned for us to know more than the year of his death. No original poems honoring Drayton appeared in the decade after his death. An undated manuscript note of the antiquary William Fulman, who was born in 1632, a year after Drayton died, states that he was honored with “a funeral procession to Westminster escorted by gentlemen of the Inns of Court and others of note,” however, and his tomb contained commemorative verses that were reprinted twice in that time. George Chapman, more known for such nondramatic poetry as his translation of Homer than for his plays, was eulogized once in the year after he died—but not again.
To sum up, the notion that Shakespeare was honored with eulogies too sparsely or late in comparison to other dramatists of his time does not hold up. But even if that were not so, the anti-Stratfordians’ rigid belief that the world strictly operates in such a way that a Great Poet like Shakespeare would have had to have gotten a hundred eloquent eulogies within five days of his death is moronic. Dozens of things might have prevented it—for example, his distant-from-London death having taken time to be reported; his main writing friends being dead themselves; his having left the London scene four or five years before and no longer being to the fore in others’ minds; it being known that he never wrote eulogies and didn’t like them; everyone’s taking his time with his eulogy for Shakespeare out of anxiety to make it first-rate, or even being too diffident to dare eulogize so superior a poet; someone’s collecting many eulogies for a book that never materialized (or for the one that did, but only after a long delay, the First Folio), or because Shakespeare, in his last years, said very contemptuous things about the other poets of the time, and they disliked him; etc.
A problem unconsidered by the anti-Stratfordians in all this is why, even as a fake, Shakespeare would not have been eulogized when he died. It makes no sense that no writer of the time believed the Stratford man was the True Author, but that he was nonetheless considered capable of being presented as just that on his monument and in the First Folio. Or that hoaxsters would want him thought The True Author, but would fail to make him look like it with a flurry of eulogies upon his death.
Aside from the “missing eulogies,” anti-Stratfordians have turned up Grave Omissions in the following:
(a) historian William Camden’s, Britannia (1607) where—as Charlton Ogburn points out—Camden referred in a passage about Stratford-upon-Avon to two of its famous natives, an Archbishop of Canterbury and Hugh Clopton, who became Lord Mayor of London. He did this in spite of two years earlier having put Shakespeare in a group of poets whom he called the “most pregnant wits of these our times, whom succeeding ages may justly admire,” in another book. Clearly, he knew of Shakespeare the poet; hence, by not mentioning him as a resident of Stratford, he was surely showing us that he did not live there.
Irvin Matus’s book, once again, comes to the rescue: “Contrary to the impression given by Ogburn, Britannia was not a new work in 1607. In fact, five editions of Britannia were published before the one of 1607. Furthermore, its title in full makes it plain Camden’s purpose was a work of serious antiquarian scholarship and not a guide to the habitats of contemporary literary figures. First published in 1586 and written entirely in Latin, Britannia, sive florentissimorum regnorum Angliae, Scotiae. Hiberniae et insularum adjacentium ex intima antiquitate chorographica Descriptio (A description of features, to the earliest times of the powerful kings, of England, Scotland, Ireland, and the adjacent islands) was primarily concerned with the history and ancient structures of Britain’s towns and cities, gathered in his perambulations throughout the English countryside. . . .
“Furthermore, like Britannia, the complete title of what is commonly called Remains concerning Britain is revealing; it is Remains of a Greater Work, concerning Britain, the Inhabitants Thereof, Their Languages, Names, Surnames, Impress, Wise Speeches, Poesie, and Epitaphs. The ‘Greater Work’ is, of course, Britannia, and Camden devised the Remains as a sort of supplement to it; a collection of material that was not appropriate to his antiquarian masterpiece—including recognition of his nation’s preeminent figures in literature, past and present, of which Shakespeare is but one.” In short, that Shakespeare was left out of Camden’s book of 1586 is to be expected.
(b) Henry Peacham’s Britannia (1622) where, in a chapter on poetry, Peacham calls the reign of Elizabeth “a golden age (for such a world of refined wits and excellent spirits it produced whose like are hardly to be hoped for in any succeeding age),” then lists by rank those “who honored poesie with their pens and practice” as follows: “Edward Earl of Oxford, the Lord Buckhurst, Henry Lord Paget, our phoenix, the noble Sir Philip Sidney, M. Edward Dyer, M. Edmund Spenser, Master Samuel Daniel, with sundry others whom (together with those admirable wits yet living and so well known) not out of envy, but to avoid tediousness, I overpass.”
About this, the indefatigable Charlton Ogburn said, “Inasmuch as it would have been quite unthinkable to deny Shakespeare, the greatest of all, an express place among the poets who had made Elizabeth’s a golden age (and orthodoxy’s ‘Shakespeare’ in 1622 could not, like Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and Michael Drayton, be excluded as among ‘those admirable wits yet living’), it can only be that his name was subsumed in another’s.”
The extended quotation above is a characteristic sample of Ogburn’s way of reasoning. What he says about Peacham’s book is, as far as I know, correct. But what he says about Shakespeare’s name is silly. In the first place, it is not “unthinkable” that somebody in 1622 might not consider Shakespeare a particularly brilliant poet. Throughout his book Ogburn consistently assumes that everybody must recognize Shakepeare’s supremacy as a writer—everybody not only of today, after 400 years of having the Bard’s excellences drilled into us, but everybody who was alive when Shakespeare was. But this is absurd.
Even in recent times there have been people who have denied that Shakespeare was much of a writer—Henry Miller, for instance, and Tolstoy. Many more would have been of this opinion in his own time, for playwrights then had about the same status as television scriptwriters do today—and how many people in 1990 could name even one of the persons who wrote for the Bill Cosby show, the most popular television show of the time in the United States, or would consider that person particularly important as a writer?
For another thing, there are always differences in taste; if anything is “unthinkable,” it is that no one would scorn Shakespeare as over-rated in any age. Many of Peacham’s ilk, for instance, rated Samuel Daniel above both Jonson and Spenser, yet the modern consensus is that the latter two were of the first rank, and Daniel minor, at best. In later times, similar apparent errors have been made: toward the end of the nineteenth century, for example, readers participating in an Atlantic Monthly poll voted Oliver Wendell Holmes America’s greatest writer of the century, above Emerson and Twain. If memory serves me, Thoreau and Whitman weren’t even mentioned.
But even if we go along with Ogburn in assuming that Peacham must have considered Shakespeare one of the Elizabethan Age’s primary ornaments, there are more possible explanations for the absence of the Bard’s name on his list than the one given, that “his name was subsumed in another’s.” One is that Peacham simply forgot to list Shakespeare! These things can happen—though probably never did to Ogburn. Or Peacham’s printer could have left out Shakespeare’s name. Such things can also happen.
Or maybe Peacham had some kind of private quarrel with Shakespeare that we don’t know about, and left his name off his list out of spite. Or had a puritanical bias against actors and playwrights (since he fails to mention the dead Marlowe, too). It is not impossible, either, that Peacham did not know that Shakespeare had died—even if it is a fact that Shakespeare’s death occurred six years before Peacham’s book was published. Maybe Peacham had been travelling. Or maybe news of Shakespeare’s death simply took a long time to get around. Moreover, because Peacham’s book was published in 1622 does not mean that all of it was written then. Peacham might have written the part about poetry before Shakespeare died, or before anyone in London knew about it.
Other reasons occurred to me before I was exposed to the more scholarly explanation of Terry Ross. Ross finds his listing Oxford “no more curious than his listing Paget and Buckhurst — in fact those two names are more curious, because Paget has left us no poetry whatsoever, and Buckhurst should have been called ‘Dorset,’ since he had been awarded the higher title after Puttenham wrote. What about Peacham’s not listing Shakespeare? We have no reason to think he ever considered listing Shakespeare (and he certainly never said that Oxford was Shakespeare), but if he had known and liked Shakespeare’s works, there would still have been these factors: Peacham (who got his list directly from Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie) dropped everyone from Puttenham’s list who was not at least a gentleman; the two he added (Spenser and Daniel) he did consider gentlemen; but Shakespeare’s works were not the works of a man Peacham would have considered an Elizabethan gentleman.”
Ross goes on to quote Peacham’s saying in The Compleat Gentleman that “Sixt and lastly, touching Mecahnicall Arts and Artists, whosoever labour for their livelihood and gaine, have no share at all in Nobilitie and Gentry: as Painters, Stage-players, Tumblers, ordinary Fidlers, Inne-keepers, Fencers, Juglers, Dancers, Mountebancks, Bearewards, and the like.” As my unscholarly guess had it, it turns out that Peacham, “seems to have shared something of the antitheatrical prejudice of the day.” Hence, the absence of playwrights in his list.
On the other hand, Shakespeare, technically, was a gentleman. No matter, for Peacham inveighed more than once against the awarding of arms to the undeserving, as an actor would have been, for him. A man had to be more than a technical gentleman to qualify as a genuine gentleman to him. Conclusion: Peacham left Shakespeare off his list of important poets because (a) his source didn’t list him; (b) he didn’t list any playwrights; (c) he listed only those he considered gentlemen, as he would not have considered Shakespeare, the actor, coat of arms and all.
A fourth possibility is that he was not aware of Shakespeare’s works, or was, but did not consider them great. There is little evidence that he knew of them and none that he admired them, for he never wrote an epigram to Shakespeare in spite of writing them to other writers, nor quoted him or referred to him in any of his writings.
(c) the First Folio, itself, which contains no biography of its author or other clear indication that Shakespeare wrote the plays in that volume—e.g., by terming him, “William Shakespeare, who was born in 1564 to John and Mary Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, who wrote the plays collected herein.” Need I comment on the absurdity of that?
As for the many other references to Shakespeare in poems and books like Meres’s Palladis Tamia, none of them have anything in them that would identify Shakespeare except his name, so can’t count as literary references for looneators. The reasons for my pig-headedly going ahead and counting them, anyway, have already been given.
(3) looneations of official reference
But what about the non-literary records that refer to Shakespeare of Stratford? Why were all of them so skimpy, none naming his occupation? How can we explain, for instance:
(a) the record of his death in the Stratford register, which only termed him “William Shakspere gent.,” although it could easily have termed him “William Shakespeare, Poet,” or the like, considering that the record of Shakespeare’s son-in-law’s death terms him, “Johannes Hall, medicus peritissimus” (most skilful physician);
(b) the “nuper in curia” entry which fails to give his occupation and affiliation with the King’s Men in a local court case Shakespeare was involved in;
(c) the inscription on the monument to him which failed to give the names of specific plays he wrote or even his first name;
(d) the inscription on his daughter Susanna’s monument, which mentioned him, but not explicitly as a writer;
(e) the inscription on his son-in-law’s monument, which mentioned him, but not explicitly as a writer.
Response: could anyone but a fanatic take these “omissions” seriously? Could any objective person find it at all odd that someone’s occupation was not noted in such records? In actual fact only one playwright of the time in England is known to have had his occupation noted in any court records like the “nuper in curia” entry just mentioned: George Chapman, who in a deposition was described in 1608 as someone who “hath since very unadvisedly spent the most part of his time and his estate in fruitless and vain Poetry,” and then in 1617, was identified in a court case as one who “hath made diverse plays and written other books.” As for mentions of occupation in a record of a playwright of the time’s death, we have no records for the deaths of the majority of playwrights of the time. I haven’t researched it, but I doubt any inscription on the tombstone of any playwright of the time’s daughter or son-in-law mentions his having been a playwright.
(4) looneations of commercial reference
A little more sensible than the looneations of official reference on the surface are the looneations of commercial reference, by which I mean the instances where Shakespeare might have been mentioned as a playwright in a record of payment for a play or some similar theatre-related commercial document. Just about the only relevant document, though, is the accounts book of Phillip Henslowe, the proprietor of several London theatres. He kept detailed theatrical records in these “diaries,” as they have come to be known, naming many actors and playwrights in the process. This, according to Ogburn, “is a strong indication that (Shakespeare’s) alleged career on the stage is illusory.”
Here’s what Dave Kathman has to say about that in his demolition of this particular piece of Ogburn’s scholarship at his and Terry Ross’s website: “Ogburn correctly notes that Henslowe put on some of Shakespeare’s plays, and he finds it odd ‘that while producing Shakespeare’s plays Henslowe never once mentioned his name.’ He does not tell the reader that these plays were all performed in 1592-94, before Henslowe began mentioning the names of any playwrights or actors at all in the Diary; by the time Henslowe did start writing down names in 1597, Shakespeare was a member of the rival Chamberlain’s Men and had no association with Henslowe. Ogburn states that ‘the names of all other prominent playwrights of the time… find a place in [Henslowe’s] diary’, which is simply a blatant falsehood; the names of Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe are absent despite the fact that Henslowe performed their plays many times, and Thomas Kyd, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas Lodge are similarly missing. Ogburn then snidely remarks that ‘if Professors Evans and Levin and Dr. McManaway could have cited another case of an actor of Shakspere’s alleged prominence not mentioned by Henslowe or Alleyn it is a fair assumption that they would have done so.’ As Irvin Matus has already pointed out, Richard Burbage, Augustine Phillips, John Heminges, and Henry Condell are among the well-known actors not mentioned by Henslowe; this is because the Diary is a record of Henslowe’s company, and by the time he began mentioning any actors by name, all these men (along with Shakespeare) were members of the rival Chamber-lain’s Men.”
All this explains, too, another prime chestnut of the looneators, the fact that there is no record of Shakespeare’s ever having been paid for a play since Henslowe’s diaries are about the only extant records of such payments to any playwright, and Henslowe began naming playwrights he paid for plays after Shakespeare was, so far as we know, writing exclusively for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men).
The only other commercial looneation the Rejectors have turned up is the fact—a valid one—that Shakespeare’s name has not been found on any of the cast-lists of acting companies that played throughout England during his time, according to a study of the records of 116 towns, including Stratford upon Avon. I can’t understand why they are bothering with this one, though, unless they have an even lower opinion of their followers than I do.
According to Irvin Matus, “Of Shakespeare’s company there are notices of only 38 performances in only nineteen provincial venues from 1594 to 1611. No member of the troupe is mentioned by name in any of them at all.” In the pertinent provincial records, which had to do only with payments to the actors—except when the actors ran afoul of the law—it is rare even to find the name of one actor receiving payment. Hence, this “absence” is another red herring: there is no reason to expect Shakespeare’s name to have gotten into provincial towns’ records of dealing with touring companies.
Conclusion: the absence of commercial references to Shakespeare from the theatrical world he worked in is entirely to be expected.
(5) looneations of governmental interest
The first instance of lack of governmental interest in Shakespeare of Stratford is hardly worth mentioning. We know from the records that tax collectors in London in 1600 went to some lengths to trace him to Sussex, whereas his permanent residence and assets were in Stratford upon Avon, where he was not sought by the authorities. Was it because those who knew him in London had no knowledge that he had any connection with Stratford upon Avon, looneators want to know.
No. It is rather more likely that it was due to authorities not wanting to go as far as Stratford to collect some small sum owed in back taxes. It is also quite possible that Shakespeare never mentioned his hometown to his landlords, whom perhaps he did not know well and who, perhaps, cared little about him so long as he paid his rent. He may even have been found and paid his taxes without its getting into any records.
A rather more consequential looneation of governmental interest has to do with all he allegedly got away with saying in his plays. For instance, according to the anti-Stratfordians, he lampooned some of the most powerful figures in the land—Burghley in Hamlet as Polonius, for one. He had to have been a beloved noble of the highest grade to have escaped punishment.
Of course, there is little evidence of any serious lampooning of specific individuals in the plays: strong evidence of this is the inability of the scholars to agree on what real person any character of Shakespeare’s was based on, coupled with the absence of any record of anyone of the time’s complaining about or even gossipping about some satirical reference to anyone other than, possibly, Jonson, in the plays.
Those who write will also know that most of the best writers build each of their best characters out of more than one real model, and include characters out of other writers’ works as partial models. Furthermore, it is known that Shakespeare took a good many of his characters straight from the many source novels, plays, chronicles and poems he stole from. But even if he did insult as important a figure as Burghley in a play, why should it not have been possible for him to have been excused by the queen—and perhaps even Burghley—because of his genius? And/or because the two were amused?
Conversely, why would some noble get away with such behavior, if the victims of the satire were thin-skinned? Why would he not have been compelled to revise his material, as we know Shakespeare was when the Brooke family objected to the depiction of their ancestor, Sir John Oldcastle, in the Henry IV trilogy and Shakespeare was forced to change his character’s name to Falstaff?
Worse than the lampooning the anti-Stratfordians find throughout the Oeuvre, however, is Shakespeare’s having written Richard II. Had the Stratford man been the real author of this play, he surely would have to have been executed for its role in the Essex rebellion. But the author, if Oxford or some other noble, would not even have been reprimanded, considering the punishments, including beheading, that the queen meted out to the conspirators? Hard to understand that.
Here’s the background: in 1601, Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, having disgraced himself when, in command of troops sent to put down a rebellion in Ireland, he unauthorizedly made a truce with the rebels, an act for which he was put under house arrest for a time, and deprived of his offices, was further punished when the queen took a significant money-making patent for sweet wines from him. Consequently, Essex gathered a few hundred followers at his estate and, when the government learned of this and demanded he appear before them, led them into London on Sunday, February 7, 1601. As he did so, he tried (in vain) to entice the Londoners to join his forces.
Richard II comes into the story because some of Essex’s men paid the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to perform it the day before Essex’s uprising. It is believed that Essex’s men chose the play to remind Londoners of what they took to be the similarity of the corruption of Richard’s court to that they found in Elizabeth’s, but no doubt they liked the precedent the play afforded of a monarch’s overthrow. It is possible, too, that Essex’s men thought a play about others rebelling against a flawed monarch would inspire them.
Be that as it may, the authorities thought it proper to look into the matter. August Phillips, one of the actors in the company, it will be remembered, was interviewed. According to his testimony, cited in Chambers, the players had been approached by Sir Charles Percy, Sir Jocelyne Percy, the Lord Montague and three others. According to the report, Phillips “saith that on Friday last was sennight [a week ago] or Thursday Sir Charles Percy Sir Jocelyne Percy and the Lord Montague with some three more spake to some of the players in the presence of this examinate to have the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard the Second to be played the Saturday next promising to get them xls. [forty shillings] more then their ordinary to play it. Where this Examinate and his fellows were determined to have played some other play, holding that play King Richard to be so old and so long out of use as that they should have small or no Company at it. But at their request this Examinate and his fellows were Content to play it the Saturday and had their xls. more than their ordinary for it and so played it accordingly.”
What else could they have said, the anti-Stratfordians understandably ask. They wouldn’t likely have admitted they put on the play to help foment a rebellion. And it is known that the queen herself, upon later seeing something about “the reign of King Richard II” among some state records William Lambarde was showing her, said to him, “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” She went on to observe that “this tragedy was played 40tie times in open streets and houses.”
It would appear, then, that the queen considered anything having to do with Richard II contributory to Essex’s rebellion. Indeed, she had already imprisoned the historian, John Hayward, who wrote about Richard II in The First Part of the Life and Raigne of Henrie IIII. Anti-Stratfordians have made much of this imprisonment of Hayward in comparison to Shakespeare’s getting off Scot-free in spite of Richard II, so a brief digression about it is in order.
Hayward’s book was registered 19 January 1599, approved for publication by Samuel Harsnett, chaplain to the Bishop of London and put on sale about a month later—but with a dedication to Essex added after approval by Hayward and his publisher. The dedication implied that Hayward’s history might prove useful for the handling of affairs either personal or of the state. The dedication also contained what Chambers called a “dangerous description” of Essex (‘magnus et presenti iudicio et futuri temporis expectatione’—”great in both the judgement of the present and in the expectation of future times”).
A month or so later Essex tried to get the dedication cancelled. By then, about 600 copies had been sold. (It eventually went through ten or more editions and was very popular.) The Bishop of London forthwith issued an order blocking the publication of any history not getting approved by the Queen’s Privy council.
Hayward went ahead a month later to print 1500 more copies. These were seized and burnt. On 11 July 1599, Dr. John Hayward admitted to inserting inauthentic stories supporting the deposition of kings into his history, under questioning before the Lord Admiral, Lord Keeper, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Attorney General charged Hayward with intending a seditious application of the figure of Richard II as presented in his book.
On 13 July, the stationer who published both editions of Hayward’s Henry IV claimed that the author first presented it to him without the dedicatory epistle to the Earl of Essex, which was ordered to be cut out of the first edition after about 600 copies were sold, in testimony before the Attorney General. He said they came up with the idea while talking casually with each other, Essex being a military hero of both. By now, Hayward had been committed to the Tower.
A week later, the Lord Bishop of London’s chaplain Mr. Harsnett, who approved the publication of Hayward’s Henry IV, apologized for his oversight, admitting that he never actually read the book, and that the copy he approved contained no dedicatory epistle. The queen was convinced the book was treasonous, but Francis Bacon seems to have talked her out of too severely punishing Hayward, although he wound up in prison, and stayed there until King James eventually released him several years later.
On all this, Rob Zigler commented at HLAS: “It looks like Hayward did a number of things wrong. His first error was were publishing a dedication to Essex implying that much greater things were expected of Essex and saying that the book provided a ‘pattern for private direction and affairs of state.’ Given that there were already worries about Essex’s feeling rebellious, it seems extremely bold. (Of course, it is possible that Hayward may not have known about the suspicions concerning Essex.)
“A second error was to include the dedication only after he had gotten approval from Harsnett. It made it look like he had tried to sneak it past the censors. It’s difficult to imagine that Hayward didn’t know that it was his book that gave rise to the Bishop’s prohibition against the further publication of histories without explicit clearance from the Privy Council. Therefore, I see his publication on the heels of that order to be another rather large miscalculation. I’m not sure that it is true, but if he did insert false stories into the history which supported the deposition of monarchs (as he confessed he did at his trial), that might have have been his biggest mistake of all.”
In short, Hayward much more directly revealed himself as a supporter of Essex than Shakespeare did in his play, and in a dedication which he surreptitiously added (or so it appeared). Hayward also had the misfortune of bring out his book at the worst possible time (when the queen was most wary of Essex’s designs, and relations between the two were maximally difficult) whereas Shakespeare wrote Richard II several years before that, in 1595 or so, when Essex was in better favor with the queen—though the play would not have seemed connected to Essex in any way at that time.
I might add that Hayward’s text was a book, and thus available for study, and to be passed on, not an ephemeral play. Hayward, too, was probably an unknown quantity, being at the time just out of school, whereas Shakespeare had been around over ten years, long enough to establish his loyalty (and that his play was just one of many histories he wrote and thus not specially composed to help Essex). That Shakespeare’s case was anything like Hayward’s is, in conclusion, absurd.
As for the queen’s sensitivity to being thought of as a second Richard the Second, that is understandable. That she should have blamed the author of Richard II for it, or the authors of the texts Shakespeare got his history from, for making the public aware of what actually happened in history would not be understandable.
Before leaving the matter, there is one more thing to discuss: the deposition scene. That scene was not printed in the quartos until 1608, so it is improbable that it was part of the performance the Lord Chamberlain’s Men gave on the eve of the Essex Uprising. In any case, there are only two possibilities: (1) the Lord Chamberlain’s Men did not play the deposition scene the Saturday before Essex’s uprising, which makes them, and the author even less blameworthy—or (2) they did–which means that the deposition scene was considered innocuous by the authorities, since they made no mention of it, and surely would have had they thought it seditious, since it would have strengthened their case against Essex all the more.
True, it is possible that the scene was performed, but no one told the authorities. The players wouldn’t have volunteered the information, nor would Essex’s men. The result would be the same: to the authorities, the play was innocuous, and that’s why Shakespeare wasn’t punished, or interviewed (so far as we know).
Actually, Will may well have been interviewed, but told the authorities that he was The Earl of Oxford, the True Author of All The Greatest Literature in the Realm, and they better not mess with him, and the fools believed him—and, of course, let him go, everyone knowing that such an exalted figure had license to do anything he wanted to, including overthrow the government.
But all we can finally know, is that the authorities quite reasonably accepted Phillips’s highly plausible answer. How could the Lord Chamberlain’s Men be punished for performing a play six-years-old that they had already “publickly acted” many times and which had been published thrice (which meant it had been approved by the authorities, who certainly would not have approved it had they seen it as seditious). Where is the evidence that this hitherto loyal group of tradesmen were aware of what Essex was up to and willing to help him? What did performing the play at the wrong time have to do with who wrote it? Why, in short, would there be any more reason to question its author about it than there would have been to question the maker of Essex’s sword?
That does it for the looneations. To try to be fair, I should point out that some of the more honest anti-Stratfordians will agree that some of the ones I’ve listed do little for their cause; some even seem silly to them. But they contend that the mere number of looneations is by itself strong evidence against Shakespeare. Diana Price, for instance, has written a whole book showing not that any one bit of missing evidence casts doubt on Shakespeare’s authorship, but the absence of any of ten kinds of “personal contemporaneous literary evidence” practically disproves it. I doubt, however, that she or others like her would agree that the sheer number of pieces of evidence for Shakespeare that she considers suspect (e.g., posthumous personal litrary evidence like Jonson’s testimony in the First Folio, anecdotal evidence like Aubry’s testimony, impersonal contemporaneous literary evidence such as the dozens of books with Shakespeare’s name on their title-pages as their author, etc.) is a point in their favor.
Be that as it may, I feel I’ve shown that many of the looneations advanced by anti-Stratfordians are ersatz—for instance, there were eulogies written for him after his death; the rest are too trivial to have any weight even taken together. Moreover, similarly diligent Pricean analysis of the authenticity of almost any other author of the time would turn up as many looneations for them as have been discovered for Shakespeare, and ambiguate as much positive evidence for them as has been (unconvincingly) ambiguated for him.
Final Verdict: that there is no good evidence against my identification of the poet Shakespeare with the Stratford Shakespeare is beyond reasonable doubt. There is, in fact, no direct evidence against it, and all the other evidence advanced against it is speculative and weak. This, in turn, is further evidence of my case’s validity. To finish completely with the attack on Shakespeare, I am now going to turn to the cases, if you can call them that, for the principle men various anti-Stratfordians have put up as the actual writer of The Oeuvre.
Next Chapter here.
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