POETICKS

THE CASE AGAINST SHAKESPEARE, PART ONE

To this point, I have shown that a substantial web of hard evidence indicates beyond sane doubt that an actor named William Shakespeare was working in the London theatre, circa 1590 to 1610; that the poet William Shakespeare was the actor William Shakespeare; and that the actor William Shakespeare was William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, which makes the poet William Shakespeare William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon,   Along the way, I’ve provided other arguments establishing that beyond reasonable doubt.  At least one, in fact, achieves that by itself, the one based on the copious direct evidence, some of it eye-witness evidence, supplied by the First Folio.    I’m not through, though, for fairness dictates that I now present, as best I can, the evidence anti-Stratfordians have come up with against the Stratford man (as opposed to their arguments against the arguments for him).

The Evidence Put Forth Against Shakespeare of Stratford 

I divide the evidence or ersatz-evidence that anti-Stratfordians use against Shakespeare into:

(1) Direct Evidence: any concrete data that directly indicates (but doesn’t necessarily prove) some statement to be true.

(2) Oxtractions: highly selective extractions from the record that anti-Stratfordians (most notably, the Oxfordians–hence, their name) have isolated from their overt meanings, context, and all relevant contradictory data, and used highly warped interpretations of to support their positions.

(3) Looneations: data about Shakespeare whose absence (or alleged absence)from the record anti-Stratfordians find inexplicable–named for the master of their employment, John Looney, the first Oxfordian.

My plan for this and the next chapter is to analyze as many reasonably serious—make that, “relatively unimbecilic”—specimens of these kinds as I can, beginning with . . .

The Explicit Direct Evidence Against Shakespeare of Stratford

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My point should be obvious by now: there is no explicit direct evidence, by my definition, against Shakespeare of Stratford’s authorship of The Oeuvre.  I don’t consider my definition of explicit direct evidence bizarre.  It is simply evidence that explicitly indicates some direct connection between a given A and a given B.   An example: a name on a title-page where one would expect an author’s name to be is explicit direct evidence that a given person of that name is the author of the book involved.  The name is explicit and it leads directly to a person who has it.  It is not, however, explicit direct evidence that a single particular person of that name is the author . . . unless he is the only one with the name, or the only known author with it.  Hence, the name “Shakespeare” on the title-page of a book is qualifies as explicit direct evidence that the Stratford man wrote the play for those knowing the evidence of the monument in his hometown church of his being an author and that no one else named Shakespeare was an author when he was alive.  Better explicit direct evidence for him as an author, though, would be the name printed as “Mr. William Shakespeare” because no one else of the time had that exact name.

I contend that all the references in print to him as a writer during his lifetime and soon after count as explicit direct evidence that he was an author because the monument makes him a known author, and there is no one else named Shakespeare who was a known author.  True, one can say the evidence of the monument doesn’t count, but that only makes explicit direct evidence based on his being a known author invalid, it does not make it not explicit direct evidence.  Not that it matters since there are enough references to M. Shakespeare” or the like to provide more than enough explicit direct evidence that he was an author to satisfy any reasonable person that such evidence for him exists.

There is no explicit direct evidence that I know of for Oxford, or any other person forwarded by anti-Stratfordians as the True Author.  So, the anti-Stratfordians must turn to the “Oxtractions” and Looneations” I spoke of.

Oxtractions

Always one of the principal oxtractions  are

(1) Shakepeare’s Signatures

The closest thing to real evidence against Shakespeare (for the rest of this chapter to be understood as the Stratford man) his opponents have oxtracted from the record are his signatures. These, many of them claim, are those of an illiterate. But according to other equally perceptive anti-Stratfordians, they are too different from one another to have been written by one man so were either forged or written for Shakespeare by various scribes. In other words, they were either the scrawl of an illiterate or the handwriting of literate persons making Shakespeare’s signature for him.

In his The Mysterious William Shakespare, Charlton Ogburn opts for scrawl. Concerning the signatures on the deed and an indenture having to do with the house in Blackfriars that Shakespeare bought, he says, “The deed for the property is signed ‘William Shakspe,’ the indenture ‘Wm Shakspe.’” All well and good. But then Ogburn adds: “Neither of the cosigners of the two documents, William Johnson and John Jackson, had any difficulty signing his surname in full.”

This is standard Ogburnian innuendo to suggest that Shakspere was semi-literate at best. But it is insane. Are we really to believe that Shakspere was able to write out “William” in full, but not his last name? Particularly in view of his somehow having learned that “Wm” was an abbreviation for “William?” Not a brilliant feat, but surely equal to learning how to spell “speare” or “spere” in full had he wanted to. Moreover, in signing his surname here, Shakespeare used a rather sophisticated condensation of its final syllable. He also had to deal with cramped places to sign (strips of parchment on the purchase and mortgage deeds of the Blackfriars property) with too little room for full signatures. In short, not only does Ogburn ridiculously misrepresent his signatures but, in leaving out key counter-data—though including the information about Jackson’s and Johnson’s signatures–gives us a classic example of an oxtraction.

Ogburn has gotten some credentialed support, however: in 1985 Her Majesty’s Stationery Office published a report that included a section on Shakespeare’s signatures by Jane Cox. Supposedly an expert on the hand-writing of the period, she said, based on the six signatures attributed to William Shakespeare and no other texts by their writer, “It is obvious at a glance that these signatures, with the exception of the last two (on the will), are not the signatures of the same man. Almost every letter is formed in a different way in each. Literate men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries developed personalized signatures, much as people do today, and it is unthinkable that Shakespeare did not. Which of the signatures . . . is the genuine article is anybody’s guess.” Note that she needed but a glance to make her conclusion; note also her use of the word, “unthinkable,” a favorite word of cranks. Later Cox wrote, “The marked discrepancies between the signatures lend credence to (anti-Stratfordianism). Could this man write his own name, let alone anything else?” Cox, for some reason claiming to be a traditionalist, theorized that others signed for Shakespeare–as lawyers sometimes signed for their clients, even those of their clients who were literate, in Shakespeare’s time.

It is obvious at a glance, however, that the signatures do not vary much from one another, particularly considering how much time there was between the writing of some of them, and the different circumstances of their writing. They have many things in common, too. How would different signers for Shakespeare know to use Secretary Script, for instance–or to put the dot of the first i in “William” under a loop of its “W?” Even if the signatures were significantly different from one another, it is a certainty that some persons’ signatures vary a great deal from one another, as Charles Hamilton, for one has shown (in his edition of Cardenio, in which he shows pairs of the signatures of various famous men like Kennedy and other U.S. presidents which truly are unrecognizable as the signatures of the same person—or, in a few cases, of any person). One could do the same with mine. So Cox’s assessment, with which other experts disagree, is of little value.

(2) the mask

High up in the ranks of oxtractions are various details of the engraving by Martin Droeshout (who, so far as we know, never personally knew Shakespeare) on the title-page of the 1623 First Folio. The engraving, according to Ogburn, is, “ambiguous, even allowing for artistic incompetence. The engraving shows a huge head, placed against a starched ruff, which seems to be floating above an absurdly small tunic with oversized shoulder wings. The right side of the front of the tunic seems to be the left side of the back and the arrangement of the buttons seems quite impossible. The face seems to have two right eyes and light comes from several different directions. An unanatomical curving line from the left ear to the chin gives the face the appearance of a mask.”

For Ogburn, this line “corresponds to no lineament of the human face.” As to what this line could possibly represent, Ogburn “can think of nothing but the edge of a mask, just as the mere tab of an ear jutting out unnaturally to the side suggests the makeshift aural appendage of a mask” There are other things wrong with the portrait according to Ogburn (and other Oxfordians, although to my knowledge he was the first one to have noticed the “mask”): none of them is attributable, of course, to the style of portraiture of the time, or to any idiosyncracies in the execution of the artist. To Ogburn, the portrait is obviously of Oxford pretending to be Shakespeare. The people behind the plot didn’t want anyone to know someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays; at the same time they wanted everyone to know it (being what I term, “schizspirators”).

The “mask-line” described by Ogburn is simply the edge of Shake-speare’s face and distinguishes his head from the neck that holds it up. The ear does look a little funny but not so funny that anyone would think anything special of it but a crank. Anyway, there is a similar line, and ear, in a seventeenth-century engraving of King James, according to Martyn Bennett’s Illustrated History of Britain. Moreover, the engraving resembles the (maskless) bust of Shakespeare in Stratford: same bald head, same goatee. There are also differences, to be sure, but no more than there are between almost any two portraits of the same person in Elizabethan times—or for that matter between almost any two photographs of the same person now.

There have been a few hypotheses forwarded over the years that the portrait is really of Marlowe as an older man, or of Oxford; or perhaps a kind of composite of Oxford and Shakspeare–just enough of the latter to fool the gullible, and enough of the former to satisfy those in the know that their author was not to be forsaken completely–or to give them a chance to nudge each other in the ribs in the shared delight of knowing that the picture was a lie. I leave it to the reader’s discretion as to whether such reasoning makes sense.

(3) The Author’s Date of Death

The date of the True Author’s death has occasioned a fair amount of energetic sleuthery on Oxford’s behalf. Oxfordians, of course, are convinced that that True Author died in 1604, so pounce on anything that might indicate that the poet Shakespeare was no longer living between that year and 1616, the year of the Stratford lout’s death. Ogburn has gathered three oxtractions on this point. One is a single word (“was”) in a poem by William Barkstead written in 1607 that says of Shakespeare that “(h)is song was worthy merit . . . Laurel is due him.” This is possibly Ogburn’s most flagrant abuse of scholarly principles, for it turns out that Barkstead’s passage is from a poem he wrote about Adonis that refers to Shakespeare apologetically as a much finer poet who had also treated Adonis. So Shakespeare’s song, or writing, in general, was not put into the past by Barkstead, just Venus and Adonis; that was published in 1593–when it was (then) worthy of praise. Similarly, five years before Ogburn died, I might have said of his The Mysterious William Shakespeare that it was hogwash without anyone’s taking me to be suggesting Ogburn was dead.

Ogburn’s second oxtraction in support of Shakespeare’s pre-1616 death is a line in Thorpe’s 1609 dedication to his printing of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In it Thorpe refers to the bard as “our ever-living poet.” “Ever-living,” according to Ogburn, with almost no examples from the time, “is a term never applied to a person who is in fact alive.” He thinks that if a poet were introduced to an audience as “our ever-living poet,” the audience would be appalled. I, however, suspect that the audience would take the phrase as a slightly flowery compliment of the poet and not worry over it. I myself take “ever-living” as a synonym for “immortal. To say of a poet that he would live forever because of the greatness of his poetry was, then, before then, and now, a commonplace. Shakespeare did so more than once in his own sonnets, and a poet named Richard Barnfield wrote some lines in 1598 that speak of Shakespeare’s narrative poems as having put his name “in fames immortall Booke,” and go on to say, “Live euer you, at least in Fame liue euer:/ Well may the Bodye dye, but Fame dies neuer.”

However, Donald Foster has shown that “ever-living” was almost certainly not a reference to Shakespeare but to God, the Maker of the Poem that is the Universe. Foster, by the way, examined much of the literature of Shakespeare’s time and found only one instance of “ever-living’s” being used to describe anyone other than God—a poem in which it was applied to Queen Elizabeth, who was alive at the time! It occurs in a passage in a letter of 1595 in William Covell’s Polimanteia (ed. A. B. Grosart, 1881, p. 34) in which Covell urges some member of the Inns of Court to write in such a way as to “give immortalitie to an ever-living Empresse,” the Queen herself. So it could have been used to describe a living Shakespeare.

In any case, it makes no sense that Thorpe would have used the adjective, “ever-living,” if it didn’t just mean, “immortal,” for that would have meant that (1) Thorpe was in on the authorship plot (and whatever anti-Stratfordians say, the more people who had to have been in on this plot, the less plausible it must seem to any rational person); (2) Thorpe didn’t mind giving away the Oxfordian game; (3) the authorities, so quick in other cases, according to anti-Stratfordians, to destroy evidence and thwart disclosures that might harm The Plot, allowed the book to be published, and didn’t hang Thorpe, so far as we know; (4) no one among the edition’s many readers, not all of them likely to be in on The Plot, was known to have commented on the use of “ever-living” to describe a man known to be still living. Ogburn’s interpretation thus seems, again, the straining of a desperate crank obsessed with making every bit of data count for his side.

The third oxtraction allegedly making Shakespeare dead before 1616 is Thorpe’s titling the collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets that he published as Shake-speares Sonnets rather than Sonnets by Shakespeare. Ogburn maintains that the first form was that generally used for dead, the second that used for living, authors. But when Shakespeare’s Othello was published in 1622, its title page said, “written by William Shakespeare,” although Shakespeare, whether the man from Stratford or Oxford, was by then dead. So I doubt there was any hard-fast rule about this. If there had been, I ask again why the Oxfordian plotters would have given the game away by using the form for a dead writer when the lout they wanted people to think had written the dead writer’s works was still alive. My own guess is that, so far as Shake-speare’s Sonnets is concerned, the name, “Shakespeare,” was used at the top of the title-page (in larger type than the book’s title, which was under it) because of the advertising value the name had by 1609.

(4) Shakespeare’s Illiteracy

It is improbable that the Stratford man would have been the Author had he not been able to read and write; hence, a cornerstone of the case against him has long been that he was either barely literate or completely illiterate. There is no direct evidence of this, as we have seen—no letter from the period referring to his inability to read and write, for example; on the other hand, there is direct evidence against it–his signatures and his monument’s reference to “all he hath writt.” Many pieces of anecdotal evidence have come down to us about his having written a comic elegy for John Combe, for instance, and satirical verses against the Lucy family. The evidence indicating he was an actor, and therefore probably could read, has to be considered, as well. Moreover, it’s hard to believe that a man taken to be a poet could have been illiterate without anyone’s commenting on it.

The anti-Stratfordians claim, as we have seen, that the poor quality of the signatures attributed to Shakespeare are evidence he was illiterate, as does the absence of any documentation that he went to school. They throw in our not having any letters, diaries or manuscripts from him as further evidence against his literacy, which is ridiculous considering how little writings of any sort we have from any literary men of the times who were not aristocrats.

(5) “first heir of my invention”

The anti-Stratfordians refuse to take Shakespeare’s dedication of Venus and Adonis at face value. Here’s how it goes: “Right Honourable, I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burthen: only if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your honourable survey, and your honour to your heart’s content; which I wish may always answer your own wish, and the world’s hopeful expectation. Your honor’s in all duty, William Shakespeare.”

Here the anti-Stratfordians go to town on the word, “invention,” claiming that the author of the dedication is referring to his new persona, “William Shakespeare,” as an invention. This, of course, would make it evidence against the Stratford man’s having been the Author. But “invention” as “made-up persona” doesn’t at all fit the context of the dedication since it would not make sense to speak of a persona as “a land” that yields poems, and of not using that persona again if the first poem attributed to it proves poor, as if a poet’s choice of a persona would then be what’s at fault. Moreover, as Terry Ross has exhaustively shown, Elizabethans overwhelmingly used “invention” to mean “creativity” or “imagination.” According to Ross, it “was originally a term in classical rhetoric and poetics. Wilson in his Art of Rhetoric (1560) said, ‘The finding out of apt matter, otherwise called Invention, is a searching out of things true, or things likely, the which may reasonably set forth a matter, and make it appear probable.’

“George Gascoigne, in his Certain Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Rhyme in English (1575), used the word similarly, as when he said, “Thus much I adventure to deliver to you (my friend) upon the rule of Invention, which of all other rules is most to be marked, and hardest to be prescribed in certain and infallible rules; nevertheless, to conclude therein, I would have you stand upon the excellency of your Invention, and stick not to study deeply for some fine device. For, that being found, pleasant words will follow well enough and fast enough.

“Then there was Sir Philip Sidney who, in his Defense of Poetry, wrote, ‘Only the Poet disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature: in making things either better then nature bringeth forth, or quite a new, forms such as never were in nature: as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimaeras, Furies, and such like . . .’”

As if this wasn’t enough, HLAS participant Nigel Davis chipped in with: “So when Samuel Nicholson dedicated his Acolastus His After-Witte (1600) to Richard Warburton saying: ‘Marvel you may at the bold approach of these my unblushing lines, the first borne of my barren invention,’ was that also (the concealed author of Venus and Adonis) using ‘Samuel Nicholson’ as a front man?”

Even if we discount Ross’s and Davis’s on-target remarks, why (as I keep asking) would Oxford or whoever, schizpiratorially decide to conceal his identity with a pseudonym, and–as he does so–refer to his use of a pseudonym? I know: the reference will only be noticed by those in The Know. But if that is the case, why bother reminding them of what they already know–with the danger that someone not in The Know will catch on?

Of course, an anti-Stratfordian would argue that Shakespeare’s calling Venus and Adonis his first poem, as we traditionalists maintain, makes little sense. He was 28 when the poem was published and active as a playwright almost everyone agrees. How could this be his first poem? Granted, this is a question no one has answered definitively. There are several plausible explanations, however. One is that he really meant something like “Opus 1” by “first heir”–or his first serious work. Plays were not considered real literature at the time or for decades afterward, as the derision Jonson got for calling his plays “works” in 1616 indicates. And Shakespeare may not have written any other long poem before Venus and Adonis.

Or that poem could have been his very first work, scribbled at the age of seventeen, say, and then substantially revised and enlarged in 1590 or thereabouts. Shakespeare could even have started it in 1580, at the age of 16, and then kept slowly working on it for years. Then set it aside until he saw an opportunity to get patronage out of it. Many poems existed only as circulated manuscripts at the time. Why could that not have been the case with this one? Or he may have been lying, giving himself the out of having written it when very young if it didn’t go over well.

One last possibility is my very own thought that by “heir of my invention” Shakespeare only meant “my creative work,” so could have been saying something like, “if you like my poem, that heir of my invention, I’ll do another; if you don’t like the first heir of my invention, though, I won’t do a second.” No one I know of has bought this particular suggestion, but I still think it worth mention. In any case, my simple point is that there are too many sufficent, reasonable explanations for Shakespeare to have called Venus and Adonis the “first heir of (his) invention” for us rationally to believe he used it to let us know he was writing under a pseudonym.

(6) question marks

The groupist (i.e., one who believes a committee wrote the works of Shakespeare) John Michell, in his Who Wrote Shakespeare, oxtracts a set of punctuation marks from the following text, which includes the following from Jonson’s First Folio tribute to Shakespeare:

          This shadow is renowned Shakespear’s? Soule of th’ age            The applause? delight? the wonder of the Stage.

It was used on the frontispiece of John Benson’s 1630 edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Michell is sure that the question marks were added as a mark of the questionability of Shakespeare’s identity by Benson (if such was his name, and most anti-Stratfordians cannot believe a real man named John Benson could have had anything to do with a book containing words by Ben Jonson; irrelevant coincidences not existing for such people–but John Benson is well-documented.) Of course, Michell, like almost all the anti-Stratfordians a propagandist, fails to quote the way Jonson’s text was originally printed. It had exclamation marks where Benson’s version has question marks: “Soule of the Age!/ The applause! delight! the wonder of our stage!”

A rational person doesn’t need to do any research to discount the question marks as no more than an oddity, for a rational person would know that in 1630, there could no longer be any sane reason to hint at funny goings-on regarding who wrote Shakespeare rather than openly revealing his true identity, or–at the very least–explicitly revealing “Shakespeare” to be a pseudonym–by calling the book, Sonnets by the Man Who Called Himself Shakespeare, for instance. And not including the portrait of Shakespeare Benson’s book contains, which is a somewhat modified copy of the Droeshout engraving. Yet again, I am baffled by the kind of mind that can believe in a hoax that uses every preposterously clumsy ruse to reveal itself at the same time that it carefully, and near-perfectly, tries to prevent anyone from knowing of the hoax.

In any event, research has been done, and it has determined that question marks and exclamation points were used interchangeably in Benson’s time, with the former sometimes being used even at the end of a sentence that is neither is an explicit question nor looks like one (as, for example, “How pretty she is!” does, because of its initial word). In the First Folio, according to Percy Simpson, who wrote a book primarily concerned with punctuation in the First Folio, Malvolio in Twelfth Night, says, “Ile be reueng’d on the whole packe of you?” Stephen Booth, another specialist in Renaissance punctuation practices says in his note to line 3 of Sonnet 95, “Question marks and exclamation points (‘admiration points’) are easily mixed up in a printer’s font, and many Renaissance texts interchange them.” More examples like the Benson version of Jonson’s words from the First Folio include Hamlet’s, “How weary, stale, flat, and vnprofitable/ Seemes to me all the vses of this world?/ Fie on’t?” The first question mark is probably there because of the “how,” but why the second? Elsewhere in the First Folio, characters say things like, “Mine honour’d Lord?” and “O old friend?” to people they definitely recognize.

Terry Ross, who has much more to say against this oxtraction than I’ve space for here, agrees with me about the reasoning behind it. In speaking of Oxfordian Peter Moore, apparent discoverer of the High Significance of the question marks, Ross says, “(his) argument belongs to a common variety of Oxfordian reasoning. While the record shows powerful and unmistakable references to Shakespeare’s authorship of his own works, Oxfordians ask us to ignore all the clear evidence and instead to extract inferences from vague ‘clues’ or ‘hints’ that speak only to Oxfordians. In the absence of any reference to the name’s being a pseudonym, we are asked by Moore to infer that Benson’s ‘question marks’ should be taken as a powerful expression of doubt, although their use is perfectly compatible with punctuation found in other texts of the period. When we look at the context of such ‘hints’ or ‘clues,’ we find out that the Oxfordian claim must, as always, be rejected.”

(7) Shakespeare’s sudden wealth

A minor event that anti-Stratfordians have made an oxtraction of is Shakespeare’s having suddenly come into a lot of money late in the ’90s. One of them finds it “a very interesting question particularly as we know his wife had to borrow money from her father-in-law’s shepherd, which as the man’s will shows, had not been repaid at his death.” This is such a stupid oxtraction, I’ll be accused of using it as a straw man. If I didn’t, though, I’d be accused of ignoring important evidence.

First of all, we don’t know that “his wife had to borrow money.” What we know is that a Thomas Whittington spoke in his will of 25 March 1601 of forty pence “that is in the hand of Anne Shaxpere, wyf unto Mr. Wyllyam Shaxspere, and is due debt unto me.” Whittington had been a shepherd for Anne Hathaway’s father, so the most likely assumption is that the father, now deceased, owed Thomas the money originally, and the debt got transferred to Anne, and that Thomas never got around to collecting it.

There are other equally unmysterious ways of explaining it. Anne could have bought something of Thomas but not had the money to pay for it with her. Or maybe at some point she was out of cash, and he helped her out—that is, she didn’t have to borrow the money, but it was convenient that she do so.

In any case, Shakespeare came into wealth much before 1601, and the wealth is easy to explain as what would likely accrue to a partner in a very successful acting company. Heminges and Condell, two of Shakespeare’s fellows in that company are also known to have become quite wealthy. Shakespeare almost certainly got patronage from Southampton (as I will show in more detail elsewhere)—though probably not the two thousand pounds one anecdote has him getting.

In short, what really happened is easy enough to guess at rationally without working in an authorship conspiracy—and just how the anti-Stratfordians do that in this case, I’m unclear; I suppose they think there’s no way he could have come into a lot of money except by blackmailing the True Author, or something. Whatever the details are, I don’t think them worth pursuing. Instead, I will turn to the anti-Stratfordians’ other idea of evidence, Looneations, which will require two new chapters.

Next Chapter here.
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