POETICKS

THE NAME

If you wanted to identify the author of a collection of literary works that seemed to be by one person, the first thing you’d want to do, it seems to me, is to check the cover or first few pages of the books in the collection to see if an author’s name showed up. If you did this with all of the forty or so editions of Shakespearean works published between 1593, the date of the first extant edition of any of his works, and 1623, the date of the most important edition of his works (the First Folio), you’d find that the title-page (or a dedicatory-page) of every one of them cites either William Shakespeare as its author, or no one.

If you were a suspicious sort, you might wonder about the ones, quite a few, that were originally printed anonymously. You’d have no cause to, though, for many plays published back then came out anonymously, including one that may have been the most popular play of its time, A Spanish Tragedy. An author’s name on a play does not seem often to have been considered nearly as much of a selling point as its title, and who performed it—just the way it is nowadays with movies and television programs. So, generally speaking, an author’s name got on the printed version of a play only if he’d attracted some kind of following. That would explain why Shakespeare’s name was rarely on the first of his plays to be printed, but began appearing on title-pages more and more as time went on, and his reputation grew. There is little reason to believe that anything more was involved.

You might also wonder about the “apochryphal” plays (and other works).  These are the relatively numerous plays and poems most scholars are certain were not by Shakespeare but which bore his name. If they could be wrongly attributed to him by their publishers, many anti-Stratfordians argue, why should the appearance of Shakespeare’s name on any title page or the like be considered meaningful? The simple answer is: because names on title pages and the like are, in general, meaningful. It makes sense to go by the majority of the cases rather than throw everything out because of a few minor exceptions (exceptions, I might add, that are easy to explain as sold under Shakespeare’s name because of its commercial value).

The more complicated answer requires us to turn to the Shakespeare studies academics.  Certain of them have done lengthy research with great care concerning the question.  One thing they’ve found is that many of the plays that just about all agree are part of The Shakespearean Ouevre appeared under Shakespeare’s name in more than one edition.  In other words, they corroborate his authorship of them. On the other hand, his name is on no more than one edition of any of the suspect plays.

There is also the way Shakespeare wrote.  The scholarly consensus is that the plays accepted as Shakespeare’s resemble each other in style, narrative preferences, outlook, and so forth, far more than they resemble any of the apocryphal.

Significantly more important, however, is the testimony of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The First Folio contains the most and best of this.  That’s because its editors, who acted in his plays (and almost certainly personally knew him), John Heminges and Henry Condell, named him the author of its plays in their two prefaces to it. The First Folio also contains material corroborating Shakespeare’s authorship of those plays by such upright citizens as Leonard Digges, Ben Jonson, and the others who contributed dedicatory material to the book.

A number of other writers of his time unequivocably identified Shakespeare as the author of at least some of the specific plays and poems ascribed to him, in the process helping confirm which of the works with his name on them were genuinely his. The first to do so was Richard Barnfield. In 1598 he attributed Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece to Shakespeare in his poem, “A Remembrance of some English Poets.” In the same year, Francis Meres attributed twelve plays to Shakespeare in his Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury (albeit he gave one of these a title no play has been identified with). In 1599 John Weever spoke in a poem of Shakespeare’s two narrative poems, and referred to Romeo and Juliet as well as to a history whose main character was a Richard as his. Around that time, too, Gabriel Harvey wrote a note about Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and Hamlet on a blank page of a copy of Speght’s translation of Chaucer, attributing all three to Shakespeare.

Over the next few years, other writers such as the anonymous authors of the Parnassus plays, Anthony Scoloker, John Webster, Thomas Freeman, William Barksted, John Taylor, Francis Beaumont and Thomas Heywood wrote of Shakespeare’s composition of one or more of the works assigned to him . . . as did some court officials who registered his plays for publication or recorded their performance. There is little or no similar testimony in favor of the apocryphal plays’ being Shakespeare’s (or of any of Shakespeare’s plays having been written by anybody else).

To this you can add the testimony of two of the (first-person) sonnets in Shakespeares Sonnets (1609), whose author verifies that they were written by someone named Will; one of them even says, “My name is Will.” It is thus close to indisputable that the body of literary works with which we are concerned were written by someone using the name, “William Shakespeare” (and no one else).

But, wait, the anti-Stratfordians demand—that is not the name the Stratford man used! Whereas the poet’s name was mostly spelled, “Shakespeare”—although sometimes it’s “Shackspeare” or even something as bizarre as “Shaxberd”—the name of the man from Stratford was not only spelled “Shakespeare,” but “Shakespere,” “Shakespear,” “Shakspeare,” “Shackspeare,” “Shakspere,” “Shackespeare,” “Shackspere,” “Shackespere,” “Shaxspere,” “Shexpere,” “Shakspe~,” “Shaxpere,” “Shagspere,” “Shaksper,” “Shaxper,” “Shaxpeare,” “Shakespe” and “Shakp.” By the anti-Stratfordians’ count, “Shakspere,” was the most common spelling, and about how Shakespeare himself seems to have spelled it in his signatures, of which six (for sure) are extant. So, for them, the man from Stratford was Shakspere, the poet someone else calling himself “Shakespeare,” an entirely different name.

This is not a compelling argument. The fact of the matter is that the spelling of surnames (and many other words) was still in flux back then. Christopher Marlowe, to take just one documented example, was recorded as “Marlye,” “Marlyne,” “Marlin,” “Marly,” “Marline,” “Marlen,” “Marlinge,” and “Marle,” on a single ongoing document, the buttery book kept at his university for keeping track of students’ purchases of wine and beer. Interestingly, if we go by his only surviving signature, Marlowe spelled his name, “Christofer Marley.” He was almost never referred to as “Marlowe,” the name most used on his published works.

Similarly, the name of the theatrical entrepreneur we know as Phillip Henslowe was spelled “Henslowe” or “Hinshley” (and variations thereof) with no apparent rhyme or reason. In a single document (a 1587 deed of partnership with John Cholmley) the name is spelled “Hinshley,” “Hinchley,” “Henslow,” and “Hinshleye”; Henslowe himself sometimes signed his name “Henslow,” sometimes “Hensley.”

And back in Stratford, the name of the family one of Shakespeare’s daughters married into, the Quineys, was spelled thirteen different ways in the records. In short, the name of almost no one of the time was consistently spelled. The orthographic evidence that the Stratford man and the poet were two different people does not hold up.

Against this, anti-Stratfordians have cobbled together an argument that while names may have been spelled various ways, they were generally spelled in such a way as to phonetically reflect one correct pronunciation each. The Stratford Shakespeare’s name, they contend, was mainly spelled without an “e” on the end of its first syllable, which was therefore pronounced “shack”; the poet’s name was mainly spelled with the “e” on the end of its first syllable, which was therefore pronounced “shake.” What really distinguishes rustic from poet, then, is not their names’ spelling but their pronunciation.

If this were the case, though, why would the Shakespeare family name ever be spelled the “wrong” way (with the “magic e”)—or spelled that way more than a few times? And why would the Quiney family name be variably phoneticized, its spelling sometimes suggesting a “long-i” pronunciation (e.g., “Quiney”), at other times a “short-i” pronunciation (e.g., “Quinny”), and at least once a long-e pronunciation “Queeney”)!? And why did so many spellers of Marley/Marlowe’s and Henslowe/Hensley’s names, to mention just two more, get them “wrong,” phonetically?

Even if we were to let the majority rule, and argue that a sixteenth-century person’s name could only be what it was most often spelled as, which is ridiculous, the anti-Stratfordians would still lose, for the Stratford man’s name was spelled with the magic “e” more often than it was not. Or so David Kathman found when he had listed and analyzed some 180 occurrences of the Stratford Shakespeare’s name that he gathered, which must include close to all of the ones extant. (The anti-Stratfordians’ strained counters to Kathman’s conclusions are too tedious to relate here, but are discussed and refuted in Appendix 1.)

Not that it matters in the end, for it is obvious that when dealing with Elizabethan family names like Shakespeare, it is the cluster of names that counts, and the Stratford man’s cluster is the same as the poet’s. And even one instance of some resident of Stratford’s referring in print to his neighbor Shakespeare as “Shakespeare” should be enough to show that the Stratford man could be known as “William Shakespeare.” And there is one such instance, for Thomas Greene, who lived for a time in the Stratford man’s house and definitely knew him (and called him his “cusin”) definitely referred to him in a letter as “William Shakespeare.” It is therefore ridiculous to make anything of the way the author of The Oeuvre’s name was spelled, or to contend that the cluster of names by which he was known distinguished him from “Shakspere,” whose cluster of names overlapped with his almost exactly.

In spite of all this, the anti-Stratfordians remain convinced that “William Shakespeare” must have been someone’s pseudonym. Surely, Ogburn muses, the name “Shakespeare” is too perfect for a world-champion poet to have occurred naturally, by chance. I wonder what Willie Wordsworth would have said to that. Or why Ed (the earl) preferred the martial “Shakespeare” to the name I would have chosen, “Talespout.”

But hold: the Oxfordians have actually found something in the historical record they believe supports their supposition that the name was their man’s pseudonym. According to Charlton Ogburn, Gabriel Harvey gave an address in 1578 before the Queen in which he effusively flattered her and various members of her court, including Oxford. In the course of his paean to Oxford, he said, or so Ogburn says he said, “Thine eyes flash fire, thy countenance shakes spears; who would not swear that Achilles had come to life again?” Earlier Harvey had said, again according to Ogburn, “Pallas striking her shield with her spear shaft will attend thee.” He also implored Oxford to bring his sword into play, says Ogburn, it now being the time for him to “sharpen the spear and to handle great engines of war.”

All this, in Ogburn’s view, “insistently associates (Oxford) with spears and spear-shaking.” Combine this with the lion holding a broken spear that is associated with one of Oxford’s titles, according to Ogburn, and Oxford’s accomplishments with the lance, or spear, in his youth, when he won more than one jousting tournament with one, and it would seem natural for him to have picked “Shake-speare” as a pseudonym—even if he did wait fourteen years after hearing Harvey’s piece to do so.

Unfortunately for Ogburn and his Oxfordian followers, his scenario is wrong on almost every count. First of all, Harvey’s piece is not an “address” given before the queen, but a poem in dactylic hexameter prepared in manuscript and then printed. And it is in Latin, not, as Ogburn implies, straight-forwardly in English. As for the three references Ogburn finds in it to “spears” and “shaking spears,” to cleverly connect Oxford with the name “Shakespeare,” two of them are outright bogus, and the third questionable. Here they are, with comments by Terry Ross:

Ogburn: “Pallas striking her shield with her spear shaft will attend thee.”

Harvey: “Aegisonansque aderit Pallas pectusque,”

Ross: “There’s no spear or spear shaft in Harvey’s Latin, only Pallas’s resounding shield and her breast.”

Ogburn: “now must the sword be brought into play, now is the time for thee to sharpen the spear and handle great engines of war.” 

Harvey: “nunc gladijs opus est: acuendus & ensis:”

Ross: “The two weapons mentioned here by Harvey are both swords: the ‘gladius’ was a knife-shaped sword, good for cutting, while the ‘ensis’ was a straight double-edged sword. Neither Latin word was used to mean ‘spear.’”

Ogburn: “thy countenance shakes spears”

Harvey: “vultus / Tela vibrat:”

Ross: “Here the translation is possible, but not necessary. A ‘telum’ was a weapon to be thrown, a missile, and is more frequently translated as ‘dart’ or ‘javelin’ than as ‘spear.’ In the plural ‘tela’ refers generally to the weapons of attack. So while ‘Tela vibrat’ could, I suppose, be translated ‘shakes spears,’ a more likely translation is ‘brandishes weapons.’  “If Harvey had wanted his readers to think ‘spear’ he could have used the Latin word most commonly translated as such in English: ‘hasta.’ The word occurs nowhere in his poem to Oxford. The poem only seems full of spears because Ogburn relies on a tendentious Oxfordian translation that introduces ‘spear’ in English where it never occurs in the Latin.”

Ogburn was also mistaken in considering “hastivibrans” an epithet for Pallas (or for anybody else), although she was called many other things, Ross informs us, such as Tritogeneia (Trito-born), Parthenos (virgin), Polias (guardian of the city), Ergane (worker); but never—in Latin or Greek—as “hastivibrans.” Indeed, the word doesn’t even have an entry in the Oxford Latin Dictionary. Nor is there any similar Greek word. Not that Athena never shook a spear, but what classical deity didn’t, at one time or another?

Where, then, did the term come from? Ross, after a long, diligent search, could not find it before Thomas Fuller’s Worthies of Warwickshire (1662), wherein Fuller refers to Shakespeare (whom he describes as having been born in “Stratford on Avon in this county,” for those who want to be sure of whom he was speaking) as one “in whom three eminent Poets may seem in some sort to be compounded, Martial in the Warlike sound of his Sur-name (whence some may conjecture him of a Military extraction,) Hasti-vibrans, or Shake-speare.”

The other two poets Fuller compares Shakespeare to, according to Ross, are “Ovid for his wit and to Terence for being ‘an exact Comaedian, yet never any Scholar.’

Like the Roman poet Martial, Shakespeare had a “warlike name,” Ross goes on to surmise—hence the witty Latin of “hastivibrans,” which Fuller seems to have coined—without a hint to its being a pseudonym or having anything to do with Pallas Athena or Minerva (her Roman equivalent).

Finally, and here I take the words of Ross, again, “it is also false to state, as Ogburn did, that Athena was the ‘goddess of the theater.’ Pallas (an epithet used of both Athena and Minerva) was a goddess of war. She was also the patron goddess of spinning, weaving (indeed, the inventor of weaving), and what used to be called ‘women’s work’: indeed, the name ‘Minerva’ was sometimes used by itself in this sense by Virgil and Ovid, just as the name of the goddess Ceres could mean ‘food.’ Pallas was the goddess of wisdom, learning, and the arts; she was the goddess of health. She was the first to cultivate olives, and therefore the olive tree was sacred to her. In Latin, ‘Palldos arbor’ is the olive tree; sometimes the word ‘Pallas’ itself has this meaning: ‘infusa Pallade’ is oil. The owl (‘Palladis ales’) was also sacred to her.

“The Greek patron of drama was not Athena but Dionysus. Some anti-Stratfordians have asserted that since Athena was the patron of Athens, and since Athens was the home of Greek theater, the epithet ‘Pallas’ might well imply ‘theater.’ Yet Athens was also the home of democracy, as well as a center of philosophy and art, and by the same reasoning, anyone coming across the name ‘Pallas’ could be expected to say ‘ah yes, democracy.’ In Athens itself, the plays were performed at a Dionisia, or festival of Dionysus.”

More bad news for the Oxfordian slant is that, even if Ogburn were right about everything he said concerning Harvey’s poem, the Bolbeck crest of a lion holding a broken spear, which Ogburn and his followers associate with one of Oxford’s titles, is not the crest of the branch of the Bolebecs associated with the de Vere family.

In short, Harvey’s poem does just about nothing to support the idea that Oxford used “Shake-speare” as a pseudonym.

But what about the hyphen, every anti-Stratfordian wants to know. It seems that the author’s name appeared as “Shake-speare” in the reprints of Richard the Third and Richard the Second that appeared in 1598. Thereafter, Shakespeare the poet’s name turned up intermittently on title-pages and elsewhere with a hyphen. This might seem just one more indication of the arbitrary way people of the times set down names, but the anti-Stratfordians, who were the first to notice it, are adamant that it had to indicate that “Shakespeare” was a pseudonym.

The Shakespeare-rejecting position here, again, is best presented by Ogburn. He compares the name, “Shake-speare,” to the names of such off-stage characters in Measure for Measure as “Deep-vow,” “Copper-spur” and “Starve-lackey,” which are clearly intended to be symbolic, not “real” names. According to Ogburn, “Only two kinds of names are hyphenated in English usage: Family names that combine two names such as Burne-Jones, Trevor-Roper . . . and in such cases both names are capitalized. ‘Shake-speare’ is manifestly not of this order. The other kind is the name manufactured to denote an action—’Master Starve-lackey’—and is unfeignedly fictitious, and it is only to this category that ‘Shake-speare’ can belong.” It is thus a pseudonym.

He neglects to tell us that such fictitious names as “Master Starve-lackey” are never the names, or close to the names, of real people, and that it might be that characteristic of such names, along with their usually comic self-descriptiveness, that makes them recognizable as “unfeignedly fictitious” rather than their having hyphens.

As for the instances of the poet’s name’s being unhyphenated, these Ogburn claims resulted from printers’ fear of giving away the game, or being out of the loop regarding the True Author.

Hyphens, of course, have nothing specific to do with made-up names. It would seem from every dictionary I’ve consulted on the matter that the hyphen is, and has been, used in English almost entirely to indicate (1) the combining of two words in a compound word, or (2) the location in a word, usually between syllables, where the word has been suspended at the end of one line, to be continued in the next line. No recognized authority on Elizabethan punctuation and spelling has ever stated that it is, or has been, used to indicate a pseudonym or any sort of fictitious name, nor has anyone writing on pseudonyms (such as Archer Taylor and Fredric J. Mosher, in their The Bibliographical History of Anonyma and Pseudonyma) ever said that a hyphen might be used to indicate a pseudonym.

It turns out that hyphens were in significantly more common use in unfictitious names during Shakespeare’s time than Ogburn believes. Evidence of this is a passage about surnames from Camden’s Remains (1605) that I chanced upon in an out-of-date biography of the Bard. According to Camden, men took their names “from that which they commonly carried, as Palmer, that is, Pilgrime, for that they carried palm when they returned from Hierusalem, Long-sword, Broad-spere, Fortescu, that is, Strong-shield, and in some such respect, Breake-speare, Shake-speare, Shotbolt, Wagstaffe. . . .”

Other genuine names that were hyphenated included the author, Charles Fitzgeoffrey’s, which was regularly hyphenated on the title pages of his works, published between 1596 and 1637 as by “Charles Fitz-Geffry,” “Charles Fitz-Geffrey,” or “Charles Fitz-Geffrie.” The name of the Protestant martyr Sir John Oldcastle, the original model for Shakespeare’s Falstaff, was hyphenated in the title of a play called “The first part of the true and honorable historie, of Sir John Old-Castle, the good Lord Cobham,” too, and Anhony Munday wrote a pageant in honor of Sir Thomas Campbell’s installation as Lord Mayor of London in 1609, the title of the printed version of which was “Camp-bell, or, The ironmonger’s faire field.”

There’s also the printer, Edward Allde, who hyphenated his own name as All-de on the title pages of many of the works he printed—e.g. Henry Fitgeffrey’s Satyres (1617), Thomas Middleton’s The Sun in Aries (1621), and John Bradford’s Holy Meditations (1622). Another printer, Robert Waldegrave, regularly hyphenated his own name as Walde-grave on the title pages of works he printed from 1582 on—including most of the Martin Marprelate pamphlets, which he printed without once that we know of hyphenating the pseudonym, “Martin Marprelate!”

Finally, there’s Sir William Cornwallis, who had a collection of essays published in a book on whose title-page was written, “By William Corne-Waleys the younger, Knight.” The collection was printed in 1600-1601 by S. Stafford and R. Read for Edmund Mattes.

In other words, the hyphenation of a name in Shakespeare’s time needn’t have meant anything special. It would seem to be stretching things absurdly to claim that it indicated that the name, “Shake-speare,” was anybody’s pseudonym.

Be that as it may, Shakespeare’s name was hyphenless in its first two appearances in published works, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, whose publication most scholars believe to have been supervised by their author (as most or all of his plays apparently were not). And of the fifteen quartos of individual plays where the name is hyphenated, thirteen are editions of three plays (Richard II, Richard III, and 1 Henry IV) all published by Andrew Wise and the man who took over Wise’s business in 1603, Matthew Law. Hence, Wise’s idiosyncratic use of hyphens, and the fact that publishers often kept title-page information intact from one edition of a work to another, was directly or indirectly responsible for around three-quarters of the instances of “Shake-speare.” And it is not far-fetched to believe that a few other printers and writers took Wise’s lead. Certainly, Ogburn’s notion that the hyphen was a signal from a few printers in the know who dared to hint at the conspiracy to conceal some noble’s authorship seems more far-fetched.

Conclusion: it would be absurd to claim that William Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon did not, in fact, have the same name as the author. That is strong direct evidence that he and the author were the same man. But two people can have the same name; or a name can be a pseudonym or the name of someone fronting for a concealed author. It is therefore not conclusive evidence that the Stratford man was our Author.

Next Chapter here.

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