POETICKS

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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