Essays of my Father S part 2 by themize61

Maintaining the regulations of the English Language and grammar today is the effort to keep the sense and meaning of speech and writing that did not exist in former ages. The purpose of language is to convey a meaning not only from one person to another as any local dialect has always done that but to convey the same meaning to all those speaking the language and to all those from one century to another, a unification that did not exist before Dr Samuel Johnson set language rules by publishing his ‘Dictionary of the English Language’ on April 15, 1755, a work that took him eight years to write. With this unprecedented complete book, Johnson provided true definitions of the words used by the ‘best authors’ that he believed to be those in the age of Spenser and Bacon.

The critics of the maintenance of the rules of grammar and the correct meaning of each word are incorrect as Chaucer was a poet as well as being a soldier, a diplomat, a justice of the peace and a member of parliament, and he did not speak in public in the language of poetry that he wrote in his later years The spoken English of today is still using many of the phrases of the ‘language of Shake speare’, oddly, as in ‘bated breath’ from ‘Merchant of Venice’, ‘salad days’ from ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ and ‘what the dickens’ from ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ but few would recognize these phrases as being from those plays. There are hundreds of phrases also to be found in the Plays that never caught the public’s attention and were never adopted into lasting into the everyday language.

LANGUAGE OF ANGLELAND O Robert J. Meyer

Whenever a reader corrects an error in grammar in the newspaper, another reader will comment that the criticism is a ‘pedantic comment about the rules of grammar’ and that such quibbling is the work of ‘grammar grandmothers’ and that all ‘should realize that English, like other languages, evolves over time’, and ‘if it didn’t we’d still be writing and speaking in the words of Shakespeare and Chaucer’. The English language has developed, not evolved, as ‘evolve’ denotes an indeliberate action of nature and not as the Dictionary defines ‘evolve’ as ‘to develop to a more highly organized state’, as the English language was developed with the purpose of unifying the many dialects and language influences from a number of invasions of other languages into the English Isles.

The critics possibly mean that the populace would be speaking Elizabethan English and not ‘Shake speare’ particularly, as no one in Elizabethan times spoke ‘Shake speare’ as they did not speak ‘Marlowe’, ‘Spenser’ or ‘Sidney’ or all poets of the time, but the critics would still be incorrect as not all of England spoke ‘Elizabethan English’ during her reign. It is noted that the people in Stratford spoke a language that could not be comprehended today and possibly those of Cambridge spoke another incomprehensible dialect as did those of Oxon, all towns closer to London than those in the north country but, in 1600, towns were still isolated for most people as there was little travel for pleasure and most of the people lived on their busy country farms or in small villages. If the English language had not been brought together under specific rules of grammar and under a single printed Dictionary specifying distinct meanings to words, there may not have been a single English language to speak today unless some linguist formed a unified dictionary.Neither the London Elizabethan English of 1600 nor the English of Chaucer’s time to 1400 was there a ‘language of England’ in the year 1400 as there was not yet an invasion by the Germanic people called Angles from whom the country derived its name from Angle Land. The country was still occupied by an ancient people, the Celts, or, specifically, the Britons who were only one of many Celtic speaking peoples who lived in Central and Western Europe. The history of the Celts is uncertain and their origination is obscure. Their name is derived from the Greek form of a Celtic word meaning ‘lofty ones’ that could also be interpreted as ‘those on high’ or possibly ‘heroes’ that denotes that they were ‘honoured’.

There existed in Europe more than 150 distinct Celtic ‘tribes’ or separate groups possibly with variations in their dialects of language as will happen when groups are geographically separated for extended times.

The Celts were adept craftspeople both in the formation of metalwork using mostly bronze but also gold and silver, along with woodwork, pottery and ornamental work using highly intricate geometric designs on plates and chalices with enamels of colours.

The most ancient of Celts left no literature as their tradition was purely oral and only through Greek and Roman historians are their proper names known. The group of Celts called the Goidels, or Gaels, who occupied western Europe and were known as ‘Gauls’ a name given to them by the Romans, ‘Gallia’, developed a formal alphabet. This Goidelic group invented a symbolic system of writing that used the ‘cross’, the ‘fylfot’, the ‘trefoil’ and other icons. The trefoil reflected their sylvan roots using the trifoliate clover leaflet as an ornamentation symbol. The fylfot, a word not found in every dictionary, is by its spelling an old word meaning ‘fill foot’ as the symbol was used in repetition to ‘fill the foot’ of a coloured window. This symbol is the ‘swastika’ in which the arms point counter-clockwise. The more familiar symbol in which the arms point clockwise is not the swastika or ‘sua istika’ but the ‘haba istika’, a ‘sign of ill luck’ whereas the swastika is the ‘sign of good luck’.

It is Julius Caesar who leaves information about the Gaels and about ‘Gaul’, he whose name is not pronounced as “Jool’ee us See’ zar” but as ‘Hoo’lee o Chaze’ erah’. Gaius Julius wrote that ‘Omnes Gallia in partes tres divisa est’ or ‘All Gaul in parts three divided is’ as might be said today if Caesar had founded the English language. Those three parts in which Gaul was divided were inhabited by three Celtic groups, the Aquitani, who gave their name to the Aquitaine, the Belgae who left their name in Belgium, and the Galli, as Julius wrote “as they are known in their own tongue, Celtae” yet he claimed that the three groups differed in their customs, laws and in their languages. He named other ‘tribes’ of these three ‘nations’, other Celts being the Helveti, Sequani, Aedui, Averni, Carnutes, Senones, Amorian, and the Veneti. The Aquitani contained the Tarbelli. Among the Belgae were the Bellovaci, Suessions, Aduatuci, Remi, Menapii and the Nervii. Some of these tribes are kept in city names, the Remi in Reims, the Suessions in Soissons and the Veneti in Venice.

In the play, ‘Julius Caesar’, penned in Elizabethan era but not in the Elizabethan language, Mark Antony speaks of the Nervii but now in accents then unknown when his character recalls “the first time that ever Caesar put it on”, the mantle that now lies upon him stained with his blood, that time “t’was on a summer’s evening in his tent, that day he overcame the Nervii”. ‘William S.’ never mentions any of the other fourteen tribes of the Celts or whether Julius ever overcame any others that he named. Also 4000 years ago, some of the Goidels, the Gaels, the Celtae of Gaul that Caesar never met, sailed out of Galli and over to the Isle of Man where they became the Manx and to the northern Isles where they became the ancestors of the Irish, of the Welsh whose language derives from a Brythonic variation of Celtic, and of the Scottish Gaels. The Celtic tribe, the Brythons, also occupied Britain, giving their name to the country. All through the Roman occupation of Britain, the Brythons retained their culture and their language that became influenced by the Roman.

Although they had common customs and speech, they had no central government and all were acting independently with a common beginning belief in sylvan spirits, Sun and Earth deities and elfin demons. The numbers of these spirits would eventually divide among isolated groups and some would specialize in certain spirits as did the Druids, a Celtic group that also contained an order of priests performing sylvan ceremonies and rituals.

One characteristic of all Celtic languages is the changing of initial consonants, as, in the Welsh word ‘tad’ meaning ‘a father’ but becomes ‘fy nhad’ for ‘my father’, ‘ei thad’ for ‘her father’ and ‘ei dad’ for ‘his father’. ‘Dad’ is a derivative in English for ‘father’ but ‘tad’ is now used by columnists to mean ‘slight degree’ as in as ‘a tad slow’ whereas Webster’s Dictionary defines ‘tad’ as ‘a little child’ since it is ‘probably short for tadpole’. Lincoln called his son, ‘Tad’. The adoption of ‘tad’ for ‘slight degree’ is an example of adopting a word with a fixed logical meaning to mean something non-related as the adoption is not essential and it is usually used through ignorance rather than invention. The English language does not require ‘evolving’ through ignorance or mistake.

By 3000 years ago, the Gauls, who were the largest Celtic tribe, swept across most of Europe through Italy, Macedonia and Thessaly and then, 2300 years ago, into Asia Minor where they created Galatia later called Turkey. When Greeks settled there later, the people were called Gallo Graeci and were dominated by Rome from 189 b.p. (before the present calendar).

be a typographical error as a ‘weigh station’ on the highway is a by pass for transport drivers to weigh their cargo. A ‘way station’ is “a small railroad station between more important ones where through trains stop only on signal.” The educations of the passport holders cannot be picked up by weighing them. A further error in this sentence is the placement of ‘as’ that should be adjacent to ‘a weigh station’ and should read, “passport holders see Canada, at best, as a weigh station”. The rules of language are for clarity from writer to reader

The same article in the first paragraph reads: “former Edmonton urban planner says he hasn’t heard hide nor hair from his compatriots”. [hasn’t ‘seen’ hide ‘or’ hair]. Neither their hides nor their hairs could e mail.

The use of language by columnists and reporters from 1980 to 2000 onwards is no longer an example of commendable English as errors through misunderstanding or carelessness abound and examples may be found daily in the press. The following is from a Maclean’s magazine article. (April 9, 2007)

Also in the same article is another and now common error of speakers and writers.

“The brokerage firms and banks (in Canada) are way too conservative.”

A reader writes to express appreciation for a recent article on Chaucer saying that Chaucer, Ovid and others were ‘struggled through’ in a private English boarding school but also wishing that “our teachers had spent a little more time inculcating into us an appreciation of the relevance of these works”. The writer demonstrates that reading the great masters is not the method of understanding the rules of grammar and the meaning of words. The reading of great writing can never be completed but the rules of grammar are limited and more easily understood

“Many Hong Kong passport holders see Canada as at best a weigh station for picking up an education.”Thiscannot

The word should be ‘far’. The error comes from the phrase, ‘far and away’ which distinguishes that ‘far’ and ‘away’ are separate. Although ‘way’ has 16 different meanings, ‘Way’ does not mean ‘far’ and it does not mean ‘away’, ‘Letters to the Editor’ of any daily paper reveals that the daily spoken language is used when writing a letter and in neither the spoken nor the written is English anything other than mistaken English that is neither that established by Chaucer nor that recorded in the Dictionary of Samuel Johnson in 1750 or in one published in 2000.

The headlines in the newspapers are written by headline writers who specialize in this. One headline read “Hilton Goes to Jail, Brings Her Makeup”. (National Post, June 5, 07) Another letter writer noticed this headline and wrote that “You go from here to there, and to take from here to there, but you come from there to here and bring from there to here. Whatever happened to that poor little verb ‘to take’ ? It apparently just had to ‘lay’ down and die. Of course, grammar is only for grandmas.” (National Post, June 8, 07) This last comment probably refers to the apocryphal story of the young ‘tad’ in school who made the slip of saying ‘ain’t’ and was asked by the teacher, ‘Where is your grammar ?’ to which the boy replied, ‘She’s home with gramper’.”

The only ‘strange’ words are ‘holt and heeth’ for ‘wood and heather’ but the ‘heather grows upon the heath’. In Elizabethan times, ‘Ye olde Shoppe’ was pronounced as ‘The old shop’ as the ‘Y’ was pronounced as ‘th’ in ‘that’ not as in ‘thin’ and ‘Yt’ was ‘that’ and this pronunciation of the spelling is rarely known today.

The following day, June 9th, another writer, the one mentioned in the first paragraph, made the comment that ‘grammar grandmothers’, not the previous writer’s ‘grandma’ ‘should realize that English evolves over time’ or “we’d still be speaking in the words of Shakespeare and Chaucer”. If that writer read all of the words in ‘Julius Caesar’ or those few lines of Chaucer in his ‘General Prologue’ to his ‘Canterbury Tales’ printed on June 6th in the National Post, that writer would find no words in the Roman play and very few words in the Prologue that are not spoken or written in the 21st century. The writer specified ‘words’ not the use of words or the spelling of words. In the Plays of the Folio, printed in 1623, the only words not used generally today are ‘thee’, ‘thou’, ‘hast’ and words such as ‘taketh’ all of which are understood and used in the King James Version of the Bible still quoted in those words today as they were when published in 1606. Oddly, modern translations of Asiatic works of antiquity contain the same phases and words as ‘thee, thou, hast and taketh’ for no reason other than to make them appear and sound like the King James Version although the works were a thousand years older than the original words in Hebrew and Greek. Recent motion pictures of old stories such as ‘Aida’ by the 20th century composer Verdi, have their English subtitles in the same rhythms and with ‘thee and thou’ included for no reason other than, possibly, to sound ‘olden’ although the time of Aida is far from 1616. All of the words are readily understood although they were the ‘words of’ not ‘Shakespeare’ but of the common man of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

Words such as ‘instill’, ‘install’ and ‘inculcate’ already convey the sense of ‘in’ and so it is superfluous to add another sense of ‘in’ as this writer does by saying ‘inculcating into us an appreciation’ instead of ‘inculcating us with an appreciation’.

This letter writer also says that at private school “History and geography were completely separate from one another and from English”. (National Post, June 8, 07) Another reader writes a Letter to the Editor to remind that “‘separate’ need not be modified by ‘completely’ as separate is separate, it needs no modification”. In this it is not ‘totally unique’.

“And bathed every veyne in swich licour of which vertue engendred is the flour” is “And bathed every vein in such liquor of which virtue engendered is the flower”. “And small fowles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open ye” is “And small fowls make melody That sleep all night with open eye.”

The words that Chaucer used in his Prologue to ‘Canterbury Tales’ may be strange at first reading but most of the words are of ‘strange’ or unfamiliar spelling indicating an odd pronunciation but they are not of unknown meaning.

“Whan that Aprill with his shoures soot The droghte of March hath perced to the roote’ is “When (it is) that April with his showers sweet, the drought of March has pierced to the root”.

No one seems to know the definition of ‘looming’, particularly the headline writers for the newspapers. Every day something is headlined as ‘looming’. “Back to work law looms” “RIM launches BlackBerry slim as iPhone looms” “Trees, gardens, walkways loom large” “Ex astronauts warn of looming asteroid threat” “‘Vision thing’ looms as election issue” All sound ominous and that seems to be the purpose of this incorrect use of the word as it rhymes with gloom and doom. From which language comes ‘vision thing’ ? No one seems to refer to the Dictionary that Samuel Johnson spent so much time and effort in regulating the polyglot uses of many words. ‘Polyglot’ comes from ‘many angles’. “‘Loom’, to come into view indistinctly, as through a mist”.

Many words and phrases infest writing by being of habitual use in spoken language, words that have no meaning or are those considered to be air fillers but automatically are used as page fillers. This includes using the phrase, ‘in fact’ when everything conveyed is considered to be factual and using that phrase directly after the first sentence when it does not mean ‘in fact’ but ‘not only that but here is something else’.

Those who use ‘focus’ are never sure of whether the word means ‘to concentrate exclusively’ as if it does not, there is no reason to use the word ‘focus’. It does not seem proper that ‘focus’ should be used to ‘focus on a number of items’ nor should the word be used in the number of instances that are found in the journals.

One encyclopaedia states that “the English vocabulary has increased greatly in 1500 years of development” and that the Oxford English Dictionary contains well over 500,000 words and that scientific and technical terms have doubled that number since 1955. In the latter twenty years of the 20th century many words have entered the spoken language as journalists have introduced new words or they have used old words to have new meanings that have not helped the populace in the understanding of meaning nor have they enriched the language as great writers and poets have in the past. .

High on the list of these unnecessary words is ‘focus’ that does not mean ‘concentrate’, but the use of the word and the overuse of the word introduces a usage that far exceeds the number of times that ‘concentrate’ would have been used had ‘focus’ been ignored.

There are many ‘strange’ words used today that were never used before 1980 and these words are not understood by those many journalists and speakers who use them. They are words with other meanings taken to mean whatever the user supposes them to mean but incorrectly. “We’ve worked with the CBC [for] so long [that] we know the parameters.” ‘Limits’, seemingly, is meant but a parameter is “a constant whose values determine the operation or characteristics if a system” in mathematics. There is no need for this incorrect word that sounds like ‘perimeter’ and this is always used in the plural. No one ever refers to a single parameter.

“It is unfortunate that Mr. Goodspeed focused his attention almost exclusively on the recalcitrant, older and conservative section of the exile population.” (Letter to the Editor by a professor of Latin American studies, National Post, March 17, 07)

A second most misused and overused word is ‘impact’ that has eliminated the use of both the noun and the verb ‘effect’ and ‘affect’ in the newspapers and in public oratory or verbal statements and the awkwardness of the use of past and future tenses of ‘impact’ does not deter its use that quickly spread over the entire English speaking world by the year 2000. All such unnecessary newly used words are immediately found in England and in Australia as soon as they are used on the American continent, assuming that these usages originate in North America.

The Jutes are ‘believed’ to be related to the inhabitants of Jutland but they soon lost any identity as a people. The first person to mention the Saxons is the mathematician, Ptolemy of Alexandria, in the 2nd century when the Jutes lived in the south Jutland Peninsula. During the 3rd and 4th centuries they moved southward to the Weser River where they subdued and absorbed two other Germanic tribes, the Chauci and the Angrivarii. King Pepi the Short of the Franks attacked the Saxons that remained in the north and his son, Charlemagne, finally subdued them by 804, converting them to his religion by threat of the sword. The Frankish ruled this new duchy of Saxony and the old duchy was dissolved by the end of the 12th century. Less is known of the Angles. They lived in ‘Schleswig Holstein’ before invading Britain giving their name to Angle Land.

In the year 400, there was a Greek language and a Roman language but no English language. In 55 b.p., the entire ‘British Isles’ except for the far north was occupied the Brythons who had expelled their earlier Goidels, the Celtic speaking people who also came from the continent and in that year Julius Caesar invaded the country and named it ‘Britannia’ from ‘Brython’ but Caesar soon left and only in the following decade did the emperor Claudius invade and experience fierce resistance by the people known now as ‘Britons’. When the Britons were finally subjugated, Roman soldiers controlled all of the country south of ‘Hadrian’s Wall’ that they built to extend from the Solway Firth to the mouth of the Tyne River. The Romans also built roads, fortifications and more than 50 towns in the territory but Roman culture had little influence upon the people in over 350 years of occupation except upon the Brythonic nobility and it disintegrated rapidly when the last of the Roman legions left ‘Britain’ in 410. By 425, the Picts, the only island tribe to withhold the Romans, invaded from the north but were driven back by the Britons. The Picts were a European tribe that had inhabited the far north of the island from 1000 b.p. and were the reason for the Roman Emperor Septimus Serveus coming to subjugate them in 208 and for the battles under Emperor Constantius Chlorus in 296 and 306 and for the building of two walls including Hadrian’s to keep them to the north. Then, in the second quarter of the 5th century, two Teutonic tribes from the continent, the Saxons followed by their close relatives, the Angles, conquered a foothold in Britain and, by the next two centuries, they occupied the entire island south of the Wall, having driven the Britons into the west areaDuring(Wales).allof this time and until 1066, there was no English language, no language of a Chaucer or of a ‘Shakespeare’ to ‘evolve’ as these two Germanic peoples along with the Jutes, another Teutonic tribe that settled in the island before 500, spoke their original Germanic languages that became known since as ‘Anglo Saxon’ and little is known of any of these groups before settling on the island other than their approximate originations.

Words are being invented and introduced for which there is no need. Old words are now used to have misleading meanings as does the word ‘skill’ that should mean an ability that requires many hours of practice as the skill to play a violin or to cut diamonds but now everyone has not one skill but many skills as the word is now always used in the plural. Children can now ‘acquire’ ‘walking skills’ but how many skills are necessary in order to walk is never made clear To allow words to be used today in direct opposition to what they meant yesterday should be unacceptable but the word ‘moot’ meaning “to bring forth for discussion or debate’ is now used to mean ‘not debatable’ or ‘not valid’ as the engineering expert, Drabble in the cartoon, complains ‘My excellent work will be rendered moot by nincompoops’ (February 3, 2006) and the same are rendering the English language meaningless.

The words used are known today only through literature. Only a few proper names kept their Celtic roots, ‘Aberdeen’ ‘mouth of the Dee’ and about 10 nouns including ‘down’ and ‘cart’. Most of the Celtic words are from more recent adoptions. An estimated 140 words remaining from the ‘Old English’ period are from those introduced from Roman origin with some from Greek origin whether from the Romans themselves or from those tribes with early contact with Rome before coming to Britain ‘kitchen, pear’ and ‘palm‘ and several ecclesiastical words introduced by Romans after 313. From the Danes who migrated to Britain from the 9th to the 11th centuries come about 40 words including ‘ill, take, cut, both, law’ and the verb ‘are’.Itisthrough literature that the words of a particular group survive and by the 9th century ‘West Saxon’ became dominant in prose literature influenced by Alfred the Great, the King of the West Saxons while the greatest poetry was that of a ‘Mercian’ mixed dialect of the Angles retained in the anonymous epic poem, ‘Beowulf’ of the 8th century.

The vocabulary grew more rapidly after the Norman Conquest in 1066 and in the next 90 years more that 900 new words were added to the ‘English’ language including ‘baron, noble, feast’, and in learning the language of the people, the Normans introduced French words for the court, the church, the government and the army along with words for medicine, the arts and scholarship. By the 14th century, universities were established in those counties where Mercian was spoken. ‘East Midland’, a subdivision of Midland became the speech of the area of London and the governmental offices in London reinforced its prominence in outer areas south of the Thames (rhyming with James) and once again by its use by poets of the 14th century, John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer and particularly by its acceptance by William Caxton’s printing press, the main reason why this ‘East Midland’ dialect developed into the Modern English language.

The languages that these people spoke and that were similar from their beginnings in Europe, did not become an amalgam of their originals called ‘Anglo Saxon’ as that name was used only by those in later ages to describe what is now called ‘Old English’ to distinguish its place in the development of a language influenced by other events, the first being the ‘Norman Invasion’ in 1066, a date considered as the beginning of what was later called ‘Middle English’ as it, too, was not so named by the people. Today, the languages of theses ‘Anglo Saxons’ are called ‘West Saxon’ for the Teutonic dialect spoken then by the Saxons; ‘Northumbrian’ and ‘Mercian’ for those spoken by the Angles, and ‘Kentish’ spoken by the Jutes. These are but other names for the original Teutonic dialects given in later ages and taken from the names of areas in which these people lived, Mercia, Kent, East Anglia, with the names, Essex and Sussex and Wessex coming from East, South and West Saxon, all being independent kingdoms. With all of these Teutonic dialects for 650 years, there was no English language although the group is now called, singly, ‘Old English’. The language was sparse in vocabulary.

Only in the 14th century was there a true ‘English Language’ brought to flower by poetic literature and its wide dissemination by printed books to be read by those few who could read. Also by the end of the previous two hundred years, the elements of the sentences depended upon word order. The declension of the noun was simplified by dropping the final ‘n’ from five cases of the fourth declension, only the word ‘oxen’ survives and from the modification of the root vowel in the plural, only ‘man, men’ and ‘foot, feet’, survive. The Scandinavian ‘they, them’ supplanted the old ‘hie, hem’ of the third person plural and ‘who, which’ and ‘that’ attained their present purpose.

Only in later ages is it possible to search available early literature and to discover the words that were introduced to the English language from the foreign as these were still not used in the daily speech anywhere. It is only from the present view of still existent literature that it is estimated which words were ‘invented’ and by whom. For most of the 20th century, it was claimed that ‘the unique poetic gift of Shakespeare’s invention outshone the poor power of any writer before or since’ or in more flowery words by the many biographers of the name of Shake speare as they knew nothing of the ‘Master Poet’. Without revealing it to their readers, the biographers readily supported this contention by the Oxford English Dictionary’s penchant of referring to examples of words from the Folio and stating that these were the first usages of the words and the ‘dictionary’ of the time became the ‘authority’ on the ‘Plays’ but not upon the ‘Play’sOnlyauthor.recently databases of 16th century books became available and many of these words used by ‘Shakespeare’ are now seen to have been prevalent earlier thereby deflating the lofty adjectives of the biographers of their phantom ‘Bard’. Many words are still found for the first time in the Plays of the Folio but no one seems interested still in who wrote these 36 Plays.

The greatest change came later in the late 15th and the early 16th centuries. This was the ‘Great Vowel Shift’ that changed the pronunciation of 18 of the 20 distinctive vowels and diphthongs. With two exceptions, all of the long vowels were now pronounced with the jaw position one degree higher. The ‘i’ and ‘u’, already in the high position, became the diphthongs ‘ah ee’ and the ‘ee oo’. The two exceptions are ‘i’, pronounced in Middle English somewhat as ‘ee’ in ‘need’ and ‘oo’ in ‘food’, yet ‘food’ is still pronounced by some in England as the ‘oo’ in ‘good’. It is known that the introduction of the French word ‘dame’ came before the Shift as it is pronounced as the vowel in ‘tame’ rather than previously as the vowel in ‘calm’.

During Elizabethan times, from 1558, the primary or ‘free schools’ were attended only by boys beginning at the age of seven and lasting eight years if fully attended but most of the boys were taken out of school before completing eight years either to contribute to the labours on their farms or to assist their parents in the family business in the towns. From the age of seven, the boys were taught Latin and they were also taught to read before they were taught to write. This resulted for most in forgetting in the summer the Latin that they had learned in the winter. Most were not able to write or to read upon leaving the ‘free school’ and many who wished to read or write later bartered with others to teach them.

‘Modern English’ is now considered in retrospect as dating from ‘about 1450 or 1500’ and is again subdivided as ‘Early Modern English’ to 1750’ and ‘Late Modern English’ since 1750, but all classifications were made from looking back at what ultimately resulted from great advances made by very few people but throughout the times from ‘1450 or 1500’ the people continued to speak the dialect of their own partially isolated areas in a country of mainly agriculturally engaged people. London contained people speaking the words of government and the arms of government, the Church, the Law, the Navy, and Medicine for which the Universities prepared the necessary courses including languages to train students for these institutions and occupations after about eight years of primary ‘free school’. The curriculum for Medicine contained ‘Latin’, and for the Clergy, ‘Greek’ and those entering a university to become naval officers studied courses in branches of mathematics. Yet, the majority of people in London did not attend a university, nor did they have the vocabulary of the leaders in government. The majority of people in the university towns of Cambridge and Oxon also did not speak the vocabulary taught at the universities, and in towns as Stratford, the people spoke a language that was as completely strange to a Londoner as it is to anyone reading it in the 21st century.

“It had been a thing, we confess, worthy to have been wished, that the Author himself had lived to have set forth, and overseen his own writings; but since it hath been ordained otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, we pray you do not envy his friends the office of their care, and pain, to have collected and published them.” The men do not state here if they were among the ‘friends’ of the Author. No contemporary ever wrote that he ever knew the Author. No one left any word that he or she had once seen the Author while walking on a street.

At least two other known portraits of the ‘Bard’ leaning upon a table while holding a pen in his right hand and pondering then next line to be written, envision the most regal furniture in his room. One portrait of the 19th century has the ‘Bard’ dressed in long hose with long sleeved doublet and white collar leaning his left elbow on a huge table with stout carved legs, his right foot upon a flat stool, his right hand with white feather pen resting on his knee. Several pages of white paper lie on the table this time with an inkwell. This, as well as do other full-length portraits of the ‘Bard’, betrays not only the lack of knowledge of how playwrights dressed in 1587 but of the conditions in which they lived as all wrote in their own domiciles. There is no known abode for ‘Shakespeare’. The house of the Mountjoys where the Stratford man is to have lived in north London knew no elaborate furniture and none of the playwrights afforded the attire that is displayed in these portraits. Most illogical in any of the full length portraits is that the pensive attitudes the ‘Bard’ are made to display his thoughts, the pen stilled while the head is turned to ponder which new word shall be invented. A table filled with books and papers, a floor littered with pages since re written would represent someone who is using copies of the original Italian stories, the history of Macbeth or of the English kings. Such books were rare and expensive and were kept by those who were most fortunate to own them and these books were treasured, held and passed on to deserving heirs. No book, papers, or letters were ever known to belong to the Man from Stratford in the large house that he owned and shared later with his daughter, Susanna who could read, and her physician husband who owned a large collection of books and his own written papers that he bequeathed to their son in law.

So much importance is granted to the words that were included in the 1632 edition of the Folio over the printed names of ‘John Heminge and Henry Condell’ by the biographers that they cannot afford to see the irony in those words and still maintain that the known unschooled man in Stratford is the adulated author mentioned in ‘The Dedication’ and in ‘To the great variety of readers’ printed over those two names as well. While the Plays are spoken of at length in these texts, the ‘Author’ is mentioned little in these long introductions.

A ‘unique poetic gift’ does not seem to apply to the well documented Man from Stratford whose scrawl six times upon an imperfect ‘will’ is the total evidence of ‘the diviner of words out of theThisheavens’.would appear in the several portraits imagined in the minds of 18th and 19th century artists who have painted portraits of the ‘Immortal Bard’ in pensive moods. One wall painting by Giovanni Battista Cipriani shows a man with the full likeness of what is now recognized as the ‘Shakespeare look’ standing beside a statue of a lion upon a high stone base with a pastoral but storm threatening background. The man is obviously in the process of writing with quill pen in the right hand while holding a large book with pages open to the centre against his waist. There is no inkwell in sight and the face is turned upwards and away to the angry sky as if to conceive, create or devise some new word before continuing. The doublet he wears is of purple silk, the sleeves many times pleated, the white lace collar wide and furled, his body wrapped further with a great blue cape.

The two men, or their names, also claim that the Plays in the Folio “are absolute in their numbers” but they do not state the number of them which they should have known and stated since they claim that “We have but collected them, and done an office to the dead” in the accompanying ‘The Dedication’ addressed to William Earl of Pembroke and his brother Philip Earl of Montgomery in 1632. Many other plays were also published in the subsequent years that were stated to be by that ‘Author’ but are known since not to be by the author of ‘Hamlet’. Since those ‘men’ also claim that the plays that they “collected” were “perfect of their limbs” and not the ‘surreptitious copies’, the first question is ‘Where have these 36 manuscripts been kept, those from the first play at a claimed date of 1592 or earlier according to some biographers, until reaching the printers in 1623, a total of 35 years for pages upon pages of delicate parchment still containing the perfect original, ‘never revised’ words written with quill pen without a blot upon them ?’

It is known who took the Plays to the printer and one man was the friend of Christopher Marlowe who took a play or two of Marlowe’s to the printer. The readers of the Folio would not know this but would be led to believe that two actors took it upon themselves to ‘collect’ supposedly from several sources and paid the printer to publish them. The names of the two players whose names were published as members of the Burbadge company may not have been familiar to readers of the Folio of 1632 but by 1709, the time of the edition of the Plays prepared by the then Poet Laureate, Nicholas Rowe, the names ‘Heminge’ and ‘Condell’ along with that of Richard Burbadge, then changed to ‘Burbage’, were the only names known of the original players. They did not know that their now popular ‘Heminge’ called himself ‘John Heminges’, which would indicate that Heminges would not have approved of his name being ‘Heminge’. London of 1709 knew very little of the theatre world of 1609 London. The stories told in 1709 reveal that they did not know how many theatre stages existed a hundred years before or where the Theatre was situated or how people arrived at these stages.

This paragraph relates the claim that death had prevented the Author himself from the task of overseeing the publishing of his own writings. They were published in 1623 but the Author must have died shortly before, curtailing his ‘wish’ to do the publishing himself and this statement is printed for the first time in the Folio of 1632 several years after the death of both men who are purported to have made these statements. Biographers never allude to this discrepancy but would have their readers believe that it was written when both men were alive in 1623, the date of the First Folio but this is still seven years after the death of ‘Wllm Shaxper’ of Stratford who is known to have lived several years there at his house without making any attempt to do anything including publishing a book. That no one at Stratford including all of the members of the man’s large family ever stated that they knew their Wllm Shaxper to be the author of anything including a letter but this has never lessened the belief among ‘Shakespeare’ biographers that he was the Author of the Plays.

The two men, ‘Heminge’ and ‘Condell’, known to be actors in the company owned by the Burbadges, continue by saying that the Plays are “absolute in their numbers as he conceived them. Who, as he was a happy imitator of Nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together; and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.” This line is heralded by those biographers who have the highest praise for the one who they claim wrote beyond the capabilities of any other author before or since, it simply rolled from his mind to the parchment without further thought, revision, or misspelling. An expert scribe could produce a copy of a play without ‘blot upon his papers’ when any page could be rewritten should a blot occur on one but this is overlooked in the praise for the playwright offered by the biographers.

Author John Webster states in the preface to his 1612 tragic play, ‘The White Devil’, his “good opinion” of the “worthy labours” of fellow play writers George Chapman, Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, then adding “the right happy and copious industry of Mr Shakespeare, Mr Dekker, and Mr Heywood”, so Webster in his own book places Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher in particular praise for style and learning before mentioning the others for ‘copious industry’ and referring to ‘Mr Shakespeare’, not as ‘William’. John Webster (1580? 1625) after he was twenty was employed by Philip Henslowe who produced the first plays of Christopher Marlowe, and Webster wrote plays in collaboration with Thomas Heywood (1574 1641) and Thomas Dekker (1572? 1632) whom he has placed after the first named four. He also partnered with John Marston (1575 1634) and Michael Drayton (1563 1631) whom he does not mention in his preface. Webster also wrote the play, ‘Duchess of Malfi’, in 1614. The theatre of London after1660 knew nothing of any of these Elizabethan playwrights as their plays were not revived by Sir William Davenant who, after the theatre-banning interim, is solely responsible for the revival of the plays of ‘Shakespeare’ whom Davenant was claiming to be his ‘godfather’.Francis Beaumont (1584 1616) and John Fletcher (1579 1625) collaborated on many plays, a masque and some poetry and their names appear on their works as co writers where those contributed to by Webster were not. The younger Beaumont excelled at writing tragic scenes, forming the plots and creating deep emotions while Fletcher was the better of the two writing scenes of comedy and lyric blank verse. Beaumont wrote at least one play alone while Fletcher wrote several alone, all of their plays after 1607. Fletcher is only now claimed to have written two plays with ‘Shakespeare’ in 1613, ‘Henry VIII’ and ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’ but Fletcher leaves no mention of it as did no one else. No one has ever given evidence than they ever saw a man called ‘Shakespeare’. It was an open acknowledgement that plays were printed for decades later with names of people who did not write the plays, biographers today claiming that printers or publishers added ‘Shakespeare’ to the name page for greater sales. This is faint praise as before the printing of the Folio in 1623 the public never knew who wrote most of the plays within it. Even the listings in modern books can be deceiving as the Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopaedia lists ‘John Heywood’ (1471 1589) as co playwright with John Webster whereas it was ThomasBeaumontHeywood.diedat

They did not seem to know how many companies existed, the actors’ names, or those of other playwrights including Marlowe and they did not know and made no effort to discover who was ‘Shakespeare’.Thesearethe only references made to the Author in the entire ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ and ‘The Dedication’ other than naming the author twice as ‘our Shakespeare’ and ‘your servant Shakespeare’ in the latter and never referred to as ‘William Shakespeare’

the age of 32 and was the first dramatist to be buried in Westminster Abbey whereas no one knew when the Author of the Folio Plays died as only those reading these inclusions in the Folio during the 19th century learned that the Author had died but the Folio never mentioned when he had died. Only the poem that was included alluded to ‘your Stratford moniment’ but this stirred no one, no poet, no actor to go to Stratford to visit the remaining family or to look for the ‘moniment’ or to ‘beg a hair of him’, nor did anyone in the renaissance days of Theatre in the 1660s make any side trip to Stratford. No playwright or poet or anyone connected to the several acting groups in London stirred a muscle to Stratford. No one had ever met, known or seen someone named ‘William Shakespeare’. It was never fully understood why the name was chosen for identification on these Plays.

Those who placed the manuscripts into the hands of the printer never went to Stratford and those papers were never seen again nor were they sought after or identified as to their destiny.

Spenser’s ‘Shepheardes Calendar’ to Sidney ‘demonstrates great poetic flexibility of the English language’ Upon the commencement of his epic, ‘The Faerie Queene’, he was appointed secretary to the 14th Baron Grey de Wilton who was the new lord deputy of Ireland. Spending most of his life in Ireland, Spenser was visited by Sir Walter Ralegh who introduced him into Queen Elizabeth’s Court. Returning to Ireland, great poetic works followed including three first books of ‘The Faerie Queene’ in 1590 and three more in 1596 and ‘Colin Clouts Come Home Again’ dedicated to Ralegh. When he married in 1594, to celebrate, he wrote the ‘best wedding poem in the English literature’. On his second return to England he was again unsuccessful at finding at patron, and upon going back to Ireland his house was burned by rebels and Spenser once again went to England where he died three months later in 1599. He was buried in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey to join the first major poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1343? 1400). No such great honour was bestowed upon ‘Shakespeare’ No one knows where ‘he’ is buried. There is no mention in any civic records in any city or town of the birth, marriage, or death of a ‘WilliamChaucerShakespeare’.wasalso born in London and educated there ‘probably’ at Saint Paul’s Cathedral School. He, like Spenser, began at Court as a page in the household of the 1st Duke of Clarence, the youngest son of the king, Edward III. By 1366, he was married to Philippa de Roet, the sister of Catharine Swynford who became the third wife of John of Gaunt, son of the king and patron of Chaucer. It is this John of Gaunt whom Richard II called “Old John of Gaunt, time honour’d Lancaster, hast thou, according to thy oath and band, Brought hither Henry Hereford, thy bold son here to make good the boisterous late appeal”, or so by a base player in regal Richard robes in a play upon the stage in a later age.

Those people would include the great poet Sir Philip Sidney to whom Spenser dedicated his first major poem but not for a patron, a contrast for the legend of one who plies to a minor moneyed Earl with sweet poesy for patronage.

Chaucer held several official appointments and traveled to France twice where he was influenced by the words of Boccaccio, Petrarch and Dante Allighieri. He held the post of controller of customs for London, clerk of the king’s works, deputy forester of the royal forest. In later life he enjoyed the favour of Richard II and then of Henry IV, yet died in ‘financial difficulties’.Through all of these duties, he was assaulted once and robbed twice in four days when in charge of the building and repair of royal establishments, but continued to write ‘The Book of the Duchess’ in honour of the first wife of John of Gaunt, the unfinished poem ‘The House of Fame’ and ‘The Parliament of Birds’ both fanciful ‘dreams’ wherein he is carried from earth by a speaking eagle in the first inspired by a scene in ‘The Devine Comedy’ and in the second he enters a garden dedicated to Venus wherein Dame Nature provides mates for the various birds. He chose a Boccaccio subject for his ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ but differed by representing sensitivity to the inconsistency of Criseyde’s love for and desertion of Troilus. His masterpiece, ‘The Canterbury Tales’, revealed his appreciative perception for the human condition and his mastery of the story form.

The man considered to be the Elizabethan Age’s greatest poet is Edmund Spenser (1552? 1599) who was born in London and educated at the University of Cambridge which already shows that he was far above the farmer or the local butcher in proceeding in life. Before he was 27, he had entered the service of the man who was the highest in the land under Elizabeth, Robert Dudley, as a courtier where he could meet England’s finest.

For the 300 years from 1066 to Chaucer’s writing, the languages of the upper classes were Latin and French, but his ‘Canterbury’, ‘Troilus’, and ‘The Parlement of Foules’, if none other, established English as the literary language and he is rightly considered the greatest of English poets as he set the style, vocabulary and metrics of English verse for more than a century after his death with Dryden, Pope and Wordsworth adapting his work into Modern English. With all his contributions to English poetry and influences on English literature and the establishment of the English language, Chaucer has escaped the largesse of worship and pontificating that has been heaped upon ‘the name upon the Quartos’, a name upon two syrupy songs to Venus and Lucrece that sophomore boys soon cleverly lampooned, a name in various spellings without complaint, a name that appeared and then did not appear on Quarto after Quarto of plays for thirty years without one question as to whether there was a human with that name.Why, after 400 years, out of the most lustrous 40 years in English history, four decades that held more poets and playwrights of worth and renown than any full century since and when more imaginative, ingenious, innovative and original poets and playwrights created exceptional literature in English, do biographers select this one name to represent ‘the greatest of all English poets’?Why did Milton choose blank verse for his epic ‘Paradise Lost’ as ‘Shakespeare;’ wrote in blank verse ? (1667) Why did Poet Laureate, John Dryden, name ‘the Divine Shakespeare’ for his shunning of rhyme in composing his “All for Love” in 1678 ? Why did Dryden go further to portray ‘Shakespeare’ as “the man who of all Modern, and perhaps Ancient Poets had the largest and most comprehensive soul” ? Why did Dryden, when informed of Shaxper of Stratford’s lack of schooling, say, “he needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature” ? Ben Jonson (1573? 1637) had been writing plays from almost the beginning until the end of the ‘Golden Age of Drama’, from his early days with the Rose theatre under Philip Henslowe where he wrote and co authored plays until his first plays, ‘Every Man in his Humour’, first performed in 1598 and ‘Everyman Out of His Humour’ in 1599 through to his ‘Bartholomew Fair’ of 1614 long after the last play credited to ‘Shakespeare’ in the Folio had been written. Jonson was involved in the printing of the Second Folio in 1632 and again his author prints are in the Dedication of the Second Folio Jonson was the End of the Elizabethan Jacobean drama era. All of the other dramatists had left the scene, Robert Greene, 1592, George Peele, 1596, Thomas Nashe, 1601. The curtain descended on Beaumont in 1616, Fletcher, Webster and Thomas Lodge, 1625, Drayton and Dekker, 1631 32, Marston and Chapman in 1634. Jonson made his bow in 1637, John Ford in 1638. The curtain was held briefly for Heywood until 1641. From the time of writing of the last play in this unequalled Era of Drama of only 50 years, from 1584 to 1634, all of the hundreds of plays written in this Era of Drama inspired only four dramatists in the following 150 years to 1784 and the Era’s greatest poetry aroused fewer poets still. Those prominent in all of English literature in those 150 years comprised a dozen. Thomas Hobbes (1588 1679) philosopher John Bunyan (1628 1688) (wrote 1666 1682) ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ printed 1678 1682) John Dryden (1631 1700) poet dramatist (wrote 1660 1678) John Locke (1634-1702) Philosopher. William Wycherley (1640? 1716) dramatist four plays (1672 1675) ‘A Country Wife’

Thomas Ottway (1652 1685) dramatist ‘Orphan’ (1680) ‘Venus Preserved’ (1682) Daniel Defoe (1660 1731) novelist journalist (wrote 1709 1727). Jonathan Swift (1667 1745) (writer 1697 1726) ‘Gulliver’s Travels’

William Congreve (1670 1729) dramatist poet 6 plays (1693 1700) ‘Old Bachelor’ (1693) Alexander Pope (1688 1744) (wrote 1704 1742) David Hume (1711-1776) philosopher historian Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709 1784) writer lexicographer

All of the literature that these dozen men accomplished was written after 1660, 25 or more years after the Era of Drama. Three years after the death of Ben Jonson, Oliver Cromwell was elected for the second time to Parliament protesting against the abuses in church and state affairs of King Charles I. He commanded a troop of cavalry against the royalists in 1642 and figured greatly in the victory during the final battle of the First Civil War 1645. The following year, King Charles gave himself up to the Scottish army that surrendered Charles to the English Parliament in However,1647.the following year the Scots signed a secret treaty with Charles and rose to support him, thus commencing the Second Civil War. Cromwell crushed both the Scottish and Irish rebels and brought Charles to trial to be beheaded in 1649. Parliament abolished the office of king and then pronounced England a Commonwealth.

So great an impression had William Davenant made upon the scene that upon the death of Ben Jonson in 1637, Davenant succeeded him as Poet Laureate in 1638 and as a fervent supporter of Charles I, he was knighted by the king in 1643. He then led an expedition to colonize Virginia in the New World but he had sailed only a short distance in the English Channel when he was captured by the Commonwealth forces and promptly sentenced to death. He languished in the Tower for the years 1650 to 1652 before being released, probably through an intercession by John Milton. While in his Tower cell, he continued to write as had Sir Walter Ralegh, and like Ralegh, Davenant wrote an epic work, the poem, ‘Gondibert’.

Public theatre productions were entirely outlawed during these years but Davenant held the occasional private performance in the houses of friends in 1656, one such production being ‘The Siege of Rhodes’ which is considered to be the first English opera.

With these years of turmoil, the acting of plays in the London theatres was prohibited. The remaining actors passed on and no potential poet, however he may have been inspired by the plays of any of the great English dramatists, was encouraged to take up a pen to write plays. The ban and the unrest resulted in no one lifting a quill to write anything. English literature was obliterated for a quarter century. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, all memory of the Elizabethan poets and their time had been expunged. As late as 1750, Dr. Samuel Johnson’s descriptions of play going betrayed his complete innocence of the theatre in 1600 London, writing to say that there was but one theatre building with no idea of where it was or of how the people arrived there. Only one man was responsible for the restoration of the Theatre in London, Sir William Davenant, the man who himself was a playwright, born at Oxon of Innkeepers. He had the distinct memory of a man who stayed at the Inn in passing from London to Stratford and upon whose lap he had sat as a very young lad. He had been told, possibly, that this was a wealthy man who was returning to his estate in Stratford from his business dealings in the great city of London. A name was mentioned to him that sounded as ‘Shacksper’. When the First Folio was printed in 1623 and the name of the author of the Plays was finally announced as ‘Shakespeare’, Davenant was then 17, a young man who possibly had great ambitions to write plays and may have recognized the similarity of the name on the Folio to that of the man staying at the family Inn. Six years later William Davenant had his first written play performed, ‘Albovine’, a tragedy, in 1629, and his best comedy, ‘The Wits’, presented in 1633, both still in the Golden Age of English drama in London.

His primary purpose was to produce his own plays but also to revive the comedies of his predecessor Ben Jonson, the plays of John Fletcher, and for the first time in more than 30 years several of those plays by one whom he introduced as his ‘Godfather’, a William Shacks per, who, in 1660, was completely unknown to the people of London.

Tom was also hypnotized by Sir William’s discourse of the subject of ‘my godfather’ but not so inquisitive as to make the journey to Stratford to pay homage to the graven image of the ‘prosperous butcher’ on the wall of the church as rumour stated. Biographers continue to relate how Tom went to Stratford to inquire of the neighbours of the man who was being made famous in London. The same biographers always overlook that Tom’s son-in-law who knew him well claimed that Tom made no journey anywhere. He was always in town as he could never abandon the stage or the opportunity to spellbind his fascinated following.

Davenant knew one thing about the Author that had mystified his inquirers until he thought it time to end their curiosity with the definitive answer of ‘what did Shacksper look like ?’

Biographers also support their view of the visit with the evidence that later Tom ‘supplied’ the new poet laureate, Nicholas Rowe, with ‘biographical information’ of the Stratford Man, for Rowe’s upcoming edition of six volumes of his ‘Works of Shakespeare’ and upon the current belief that the Stratford Man was the Author of the Plays, Rowe’s accompanying insert, ‘Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespeare’, the first such ‘biography’ and the one that every other biographer for the next two centuries relied upon for ‘authenticity’. Betterton relied upon the current fables that had collected in the minds of the credulous for the past 46 years as he possibly forgot anything that Davenant had invented.

Sir William welcomed every query and he had a fascinating story with each reply. On the subject of the Author of Hamlet, he always left his rapt audience unsatisfied as time after time he would drop an enticing morsel of new information but always left them again asking for more to which he always replied, ‘Come to the theatre tomorrow night and you will be again surprised’. Davenant was more than a playwright, he was the first great ‘showman’. In his ‘Duke of York Players’, sounding as a company of a patron of old, Sir William’s leading player and protégée was young Thomas Betterton (1635 1710), too young to have known the Golden Age, but young enough to have ambition and an appreciation of his older mentor and also naïve enough to believe everything that wily old Willie Davenant told him. ‘Our Tom’ played the wide range of ‘William’ heroes resurrected by Willie, from Timon of Athens, Sir Toby Belch and Macbeth to the aged Lear although Tom Betterton was 25 in 1660.

Directly upon the Restoration in 1660, Sir William Davenant was prepared to revive the Theatre that he loved back once again into London. He immediately formed the ‘Duke of York Players’ modelled on the theatre companies that he had known in the 1630s.

Did Davenant know him ? Had Davenant ever played the Dane ?

Davenant never described his ‘godfather’ to anyone and so they never knew if he were portly and jolly or slim, svelte and goateed. Sir William would be too young to remember any physical trait of the traveller. He cleverly sought out and found the exact portrait of the father whom he would have chosen if he could

In the local Inns, Sir William regaled his eager audiences with tales of the early days in the now forgotten Theatre with the jibes of Jonson, and he recalled the thrills he had experienced upon the opening of his first play, the heart pounding dead silence that followed, and then the unexpected roar of the applause that raced his heart. Then questions would follow from those around who had witnessed the tragedy that he produced the night before. Who was the author ?

Rowe was born in Little Barford in Bedfordshire in 1674 and although he, too, had the yearning to write plays, he had never experienced the great revival of theatre from 1660 but seeing Betterton in Macbeth and later as Falstaff, he had become so enamoured of the Author that he decided to publish the first critical edition of the Plays in six volumes. Curiosity about the life of the Author decided him to include a brief ‘Life’ and he depended upon Betterton to supply the interesting details. To read the disjointed ‘Life’ of the Great Poet that was printed is proof that Betterton never made a visit to Stratford, as his son in law attested, as all of the fantasy he supplied was hearsay in London and none that only a Stratfordian could authenticate but Rowe never doubted Betterton as the younger man would never doubt the veracity of the greatest player of the Restoration and the embodiment of Henry the Eighth.

Rowe’s most successful play was ‘Tamerlane’ produced in 1702, a subject that Christopher Marlowe had completed as his first play, ‘Tamburlaine’, on the conqueror, Timur the Lame, and Marlowe’s play was ready for production on the stage as he carried it under his arm when he entered London for the first time in 1587. It is not stated whether anyone staged a Marlowe play after 1660. Rowe wrote seven other plays including ‘The Tragedy of Jane Shore’ in 1714. The following year, Nicholas Rowe was named poet Laureate.

Betterton was 25 when he began acting for Davenant at a time when Sir William was 54 and now Betterton was the older man of 74 when the playwright, Nicholas Rowe at 34 asked him for some biographical information on his former director’s godfather as Betterton was the only known connection between the present 1708 and the Mysterious Man in the Golden Era of Drama.Nicholas

How did the playgoers of the 1660s consider the Plays of ‘Shakespeare’ as presented to them by Sir William Davenant and his ‘Duke of York Players ? Only a very few people had privately experienced the stage portrayal of a play by anyone in several decades and modern biographers have no idea of how the people considered any of the plays of Ben Jonson or of Fletcher to represent the other playwrights of that Golden Age or if the people had heard of Marlowe or Kyd.

Now he could and he did choose the man to be his ‘father’, the unknown man who had his portrait painted decades before and that ended in the possession of a person whose name the portrait is known by in the 21st century. Sir William presented the theatre world of London with the ‘Chandos’ portrait.

The only documented response to the plays presented by the Theatre of Davenant is from poets and dramatists who have left their reactions to the Plays of ‘Shakespeare’ unmentioned.

It is the ‘very spit and image’ of his ‘father’ but he never divulged that he bought it. Placed in his theatre for all to witness was this first of many portraits to find their way into ‘authenticity’ to be the exact likeness to the man who wasn’t.

So all of all of the myths and suppositions about the Author went into the ‘Some Account of the Life’, which stated that young Will Shaxper was taken out of school as a lad to help butcher the cows, that he ‘fell into bad company’ and ‘poached a deer’ from the park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy who some later biographers saw in one of the plays about ‘luces’, and how he had to ‘flee the town’ and was ‘taken into the theatre’ in London after ‘parking the horses of the playgoers’. It was never mentioned that this ‘lad’ was later identified as a married man with two children at the time.

Why did Dryden go further to portray ‘Shakespeare’ as “the man who of all Modern, and perhaps Ancient Poets had the largest and most comprehensive soul” in his ‘Essay of Dramatic Poetry’ in 1668 ?

The use of ‘divine’ and ‘soul’ are not the usual terms to describe a writer of plays and they are words with vastly different meanings to different ears and they may be laid aside. So, again which aspects of the plays as they appear in the Folio raise them to stand above all ‘Modern and perhaps Ancient poets’ ?

It is not understood which are the ‘Modern’ poets to whom Dryden refers. There were William Wycherly, Thomas Ottway and William Congreve who were dramatists and together they wrote 12 plays but all were written after 1672 and Dryden wrote this praise in 1668. John Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ was printed 1678-1682, Jonathan Swift wrote from 1697, Alexander Pope from 1704, Daniel Defoe from 1709.

These accolades are the first of all such praise for these Plays but why did he make them ?

The answer is in the years in which these statements and decisions were made by Milton and Dryden as they were all pronounced soon after the Davenant productions and Davenant provided only a limited number of playwrights and those plays presented from the Folio were far in the majority if only twelve of the thirty six were staged and witnessed. These few renewed plays created enough interest for the Folio to receive its third edition in 1672 and yet another edition was released before the 6 volume ‘critical edition’ by Nicholas Rowe in 1in 1709.

Was this the same reason why Milton, too, chose blank verse for his epic ‘Paradise Lost’ in 1667, that ‘Shakespeare’ wrote in blank verse ?

Only two poets provided this praise and their names are still well known but in all of England there were only two poets to speak of anything, Milton and Dryden, both of whom had little knowledge of the dozens of poets of the Elizabethan Age with no interim poets for the century between 1630 and 1730 from Ben Jonson to themselves.

Which elements of the ‘blank verse poetry’ as found in the 36 plays of the Folio convinced John Dryden that the Author of these plays stood above all and was “the Man who of all the Modern, and perhaps Ancient Poets had the largest and most comprehensive soul” ?

It is neither understood who were the ‘Ancient poets’ of Dryden’s opinion. Were they the classic ‘ancients’ considered from Chaucer to the Elizabethans as ‘the Greeks and the Latines’ or did Dryden consider the Elizabethan poets including his ‘Divine’ as ‘Ancients’ ?

Why did the poet laureate, John Dryden, call ‘Shakespeare’ the “Divine Shakespeare” ?

What was the foremost quality of the Folio plays that placed them beyond all others into the 21st century ? Was it their originality in subjects ? Only one is considered to be the imagination of the Author and is supposed by some biographers to be written on ‘his’ personal experiences in the Elizabethan Court written as a vocal duel between those with Ralegh and those against him. This comes from the supposition that ‘Shake speare’ was welcomed personally, roamed freely and knew all the now famous names at Court, but none there ever left any evidence of knowing the Author. Since there were no original conceptions in the Folio, what is the quality of the writing that ascends all other ?

When Dryden wrote his ‘All for Love’ in blank verse in 1678, did he decide to abandon traditional rhyme, established firmly by Chaucer, because he considered blank verse to be a better medium or was this to pay homage to ‘the Divine Shakespeare’ and only that the Folio plays were in blank verse ?

Is the exact construction of each sentence, then, the elixir that turns mundane words into responses from the listener reader that the slightest change in the words would never generate ?

All of the 35 plays were written directly from previous tales, true and imaginative, from Rome and France and from the ‘Holinshed’s Chronicles’ of English history, the rare and expensive book that Marlowe had previously explored for his ‘Edward II’ in 1593. In fashioning the words of the historian to drama, many single lines are taken down verbatim, great lengths of the printed account are reduced to a single line while a single line is increased in significance to an entire captivating soliloquy by the hero of the tale.

Ah, there lies the secret of this Author, he can with his well chosen words captivate an audience through his living interpreter in a manner no other one has ever peered. Oh, but this very attribute was praised in ‘Pierce Penniless’ in the 1590s when dramatist Thomas Nashe (1567 1601) described the audience as seeing the hero ‘live again’ upon the stage and raucous cheers for the actor and not for the author who was not this Author.

The precise construction must be the rub. Rub ? What means ‘rub’ ? It follows one of the most quoted phrases in the book and no other word would be tolerated but what means ‘rub’ ? Under the listing in ‘Webster’s New World Dictionary’, the only possible meaning in this text is “an obstacle, hindrance or difficulty’ and none of these words seem appropriate and the word is never used now for any these meanings. In the ‘Funk & Wagnalls’, the noun, ‘rub’, is defined as ‘a hindrance, a doubt’ and gives an example, ‘There’s the rub’, which is to explain the meaning in a known context and does not explain what the Author meant. Could the Author have meant, ‘To sleep ! perchance to dream. There’s the hindrance’ ? Neither ‘hindrance’ or ‘doubt’ make any sense as the Author does not say ‘There’s a rub’ but ‘There is The rub.’ The dictionary writer has taken what he or is generally perceived to be the meaning of Hamlet as being The meaning;Hamlet, in the play, is contemplating the act of suicide, a most serious concern, but does his entire monologue make sense in the construction of the play ? This deliberation is in the first scene but of Act III, long after his previous contemplation on suicide in the first Act when he wishes that his ‘too solid flesh would melt’ and how ‘weary, stale, flat’ seem to him all ‘the uses of this world’. In the long interim between these thoughts of self destruction, this callow youth pondering whether he should ‘be’ or not when ‘the fit is on him’ is completely delighted in welcoming a motley crew of actors and enjoying immensely his telling them in precise detail how they should perform their craft as culled from his world of non experience. Hold, now, it is not the unhappy Prince who is speaking here, say the biographers, but the Master Poet Actor Director Producer Holder of Horses, pouring forth all that he has observed as iniquities in and the essentials he has taught to all of the actors in ‘his company’ that belonged to the Burbadges or, it would seem, none of these Plays would have lasted beyond their first presentation.

The precise construction must be the supreme reason if not the only reason for the general adulation of the Author. No one has constructed the words in a way to hold his viewers as enthralled as did the all inclusive, far reaching Author who appeals to the very essence of the phantom spirit. It would be a transgression to substitute a single word.

From the beginning in 1597, not one of the Plays when performed on stage always used the same words in the exact form as they appear in the First Folio. Of all of the printed Quartos of the few plays that were published before 1623 not one correlated to the Folio version. Only a few of these Quartos had the name ‘Shake speare’ on the title page.

The idolater, John Dryden, and possibly Milton or any of the dozen authors living during that half century, had only the introduction to the Author made possible for them by the man, Sir William Davenant, who had his own purposes in presenting a number of these plays to the new generation that may have been as ignorant of them as they were of most of the other Elizabethan poets. If it had not been for this collection being revived by Davenant, all of the contemporary dramatists may have been forgotten by modern theatre producers. It is almost certain that those that have found a rare revival were re recognized because of the 1660 revival of the Folio plays.

When the Plays were revived by the ‘godson of the Author’, Davenant in all his admiration greatly adapted and reworked the plays before staging them, the audience never hearing the words as they are printed in the Folio although the Third Folio was published as well as another before Rowe’s 6 volume set in 1709. In it, Nicholas Rowe made an ‘arrangement of acts and scenes’ which would facilitate rehearsals but Rowe, so enamoured with the Plays that he went to the exceeding labour of preparing ‘the first critical edition’ of this ‘dramatist’ that his respect for the Author’s words did not stay his hand in ‘modernizing the grammar and spelling’. The spelling could be overlooked as that does not alter the pronunciation or the colour of the words in performance but the Author’s grammar was ancient ?

It is also because of this revival, that those who praised the Author did so with little else with which to compare the plays, Dryden being the foremost and possibly almost the only appraiser. Dryden was born of a Puritan family in Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire, in 1631 and was educated at Westminster School and at Trinity College, Cambridge where Christopher Marlowe studied for the Ministry and obtained all necessary to be a minister in the church but created all that was necessary to become the foremost dramatist of his lifetime, a fully completed play. Dryden, rather, in coming to London exactly 70 years after Marlowe, served as clerk to a relative who happened to be chamberlain to the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell in 1657. After the Restoration, he wrote his first important poem, ‘Heroic Stanzas’ in memory of Cromwell, but having now quickly become a Royalist, he wrote two poems celebrating the return of Charles II. As another fortunate happenstance, in 1663, Dryden married Lady Elizabeth Howard who happened to be the sister of Dryden’s patron, who was Sir Robert Howard, a happenstance that never happened to the finest poets, Spenser or Sidney, or to any dramatist. Dryden never considered writing plays until he was 30, an age that was very late in the days of Kyd and Marlowe. Until 1598, no one had seen the name ‘Shake speare’ and when it was later learned centuries later that the Man from Stratford was born in 1564, this automatically made their ‘Bard’ fully 32 years old before anyone had seen the name in print, so 20th century biographers invented other chores for him to do, acting, co authoring plays as a member of an acting company, everything that is known that Ben Jonson did before writing his first play.

Rather than co authoring plays, or acting, Dryden turned to playwriting ‘as a source of income’ that was never the reason of any Elizabethan poet as there was little monetary reward for writing a play but the actors were paid for each performance thus having the only dependable employment. The biographers’ ‘William’ retired a ‘wealthy man’ because he did not write plays but lent money at ‘ten in a hundred’ and never sold a property that he bought relying on ‘tithes’ from the Dryden’srenters.first play failed in 1662 but the second in 1664 was a success and “During the next twenty years” from 1664 “he became the most prominent dramatist in England” as the encyclopaedia claims, but his other seven plays were written within the next four years, not ‘twenty’, and all are unknown in the 21st century while his three ‘rivals’ had written a total of ten plays, or nineteen English plays until 1682 with Nicholas Rowe’s eight plays from 1702 to 1715, and with only Wycherly’s ‘A Country Wife’ being familiar throughout the 20th century.

This was to put an end in 1632 to any questions that may have been raised by the Folio of 1623 that presented play goers with wordings that contrasted with what they were sure that they heard oft times at the Theatre or at the Curtain or recently at the Globe. This meant that all the printed Quartos were wrong and, further, that the actors whom they loved and who became for them ‘old Lear’ or ‘young Launcelot Gobbo’ were frauds, too, injurious impostors mouthing deformed utterances in every performance that they had cheered.

His contemporary, Nahum Tate, (1652 1715) also a poet and playwright, whose knowledge of Elizabethan theatre poets was limited to what was produced after 1660 when he was eight, made a career or re writing the Folio plays and all other ‘old’ plays. The current mores of the Restoration distinctly divided comedy from tragedy as it was only reasonable that there could be no comedic phases in a tragic situation. Therefore Tate as well as others in the profession had to excise King Lear’s ‘Fool’ entirely from his court as his inane drollery would upset the serious mood. The play’s Author was also remiss in providing a serious ending to the tragedy so it is was only logical that feelings in the audience would be calmed by having Cordelia marry Edgar. This addition would require considerable added lines that were appreciated by the viewers as all those other endless lines by the ‘original’ Author. No author of the time would ever consider allowing an innocent person to die on stage, so out with any dying.

Almost forgotten in this revival age of Theatre is that it covered 1666, the year of the Great Fire of London in September which Dryden celebrated in his poem, ‘Annus Mirabilis’ in 1667 that elaborated on the ‘Wonderful Year’. Having abandoned writing for the stage, he was appointed poet laureate and Historiographer Royal in 1670 after which there is a decade pause in writing with all other works written after 1681. Among his un revived comedies are ‘An Evening’s Love’, ‘Ladies a la mode’, and ‘Marriage a al Mode’ that are ‘broad and bawdy’ while ‘The Kind Keeper’ was banned as ‘being indecent’. Dryden was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Of his being convinced of the worth of ‘blank verse’ because of its use by ‘Shake speare’, Dryden wrote exactly one play in blank verse and it was later in 1678, “All for Love” or ‘The World Well Lost’ that was ‘a version of the story of Antony and Cleopatra’. At least he imitated his ‘Bard’ in choosing the story of these rarely known people of a former age. Dryden’s ardent admiration for the precise words of his ‘Divine’ ‘Shake speare’ is clearly evident with the many liberties that he took freely in ‘improving’ the beloved Plays by ‘polishing up’ those deficiencies to better satisfy the audiences. He was not alone.

Was the popularity of the Folio Plays due to their superior use of words or that they were almost the only plays available to the people after the Restoration and far into the 18th century ?

In the 20th century, the words were all. The many biographers used only the most adulating tributes to the man whom they still believe as the Author as critics claimed the words supreme.

The words, exactly as they appear in the Folio version, were declared to be the rightful and sole state as written by ‘the Author’, “perfect of their limbs, and all the rest, absolute in their numbers as he conceived them” as whoever wrote the words in the Second Folio of 1632 over the names of the deceased John Heminges and Henry Condell asserted. This was to assure the readers that whatever they may have seen on stage or read in the printed Quartos that would present words, phrases and entire passages completely dissimilar to those in the Folio, that the Folio expressed the true account and by what they had heard spoken by actors on the stages for the past thirty five years, “you were abused with divers stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors that exposed them”.

Members of the Royal Court may have known the names of the most prominent actors, but they care not for who did or did not write any of the plays that they witnessed.

There is no record of a comment or complaint from anyone including the playwrights still living about the now revealed authorship of these plays. In addition to Jonson, eight well known dramatists were living in 1623, and three still in 1632, possibly to know of the supposed claims that ‘Heminge and Condell’ made about the legitimacy of the Quarto versions in the Second Folio, but the three, Marston, Drayton and Heywood, would be aware that the two actors, Condell and Heminges, were not living in 1632.

the age of drama from 1585, the author of a play was unimportant. There seemingly were no programmes at the theatres, and to the theatre goers, the actors were the characters they portrayed on stage and the actors were remembered and not who had written the play. Those few who could afford to buy a Quarto of a play near the church steps rarely saw the name of the author on the title page, and in the 20th century, the only instances mentioned by biographers of a name on a Quarto are the few that contained the name ‘by William Shake speare’, the spelling as the name appeared on the title page After 1660, the final ‘e’ was dropped in their ‘modernizing’ of all Elizabethan spelling.

Those responsible for hiring the companies for royal performances had to be informed of which plays the Queen had seen before by the known Burbadge or by another advisor. That leaves the other dramatists who knew each other and would often complain together of their plight for money when all monies went to the actors for repeated performances from which the authors received nothing as they had sold their plays to the owner of the acting company. The dramatists would know who wrote which play and it seems reasonable that they did know.

How many dramatists were alive at the printing of the First Folio in 1623 and ‘learned’ for the first time who wrote the 36 plays within ? There is no record of a complaint or comment upon the name of ‘Shake speare’ appearing on certain Quartos. There are another twenty four plays in the Folio that either were never in print before or only a few that did not have an author’s name on its Quarto printing.

The unique construction of the sentences is the entire key to the identity of an author, not the number of times a word is used, not in the invention of new words, but in the construction with phrases known only from that person’s experience. Therefore, neither ‘The Dedication’ nor ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’. in which fraud and impostors are declared. was written by men who had been actors in a company, but by a man, a writer of stately prose. The Dedication that is properly addressed to the brothers, the Earl of Pembroke and the Earl of Montgomery, is expressed in the correct manner. The text of this ‘letter’ abounds in phases throughout that never vary from the appropriate words of respect that only a person totally familiar with the propriety of language could convey. The experienced writer and teacher, Ben Jonson, was still living in 1632.Throughout

The torch bearer for ‘Shake speare’ for the 18th century was the actor David Garrick (1717 79) who turned ‘praise’ into ‘Bardolatry’, understandably as there were so few stage plays written during the full century from Ben Jonson’s death, 1637, until Garrick came to London in 1737. Garrick was born in Hereford and, oddly, for one whose profession would depend upon the English language, he was a descendant of a French Huguenot family that had settled in England shortly after 1685, only 32 years before his birth. Educated at Lichfield Grammar School, he also attended for a few months another Lichfield school that ‘happened’ to be managed by Samuel Johnson who, when he closed the school in 1737 to seek his fortune in London, took Garrick with him. Garrick then studied law and later became a wine merchant.

After the official opening of the new Town Hall that was pre arranged by Garrick, the first time visitors could now go to the church and look upon the full face of William Shaxper high upon the wall, that looked not a whit like the portrait of the Master that Davenant had shown years ago at his theatre. They could touch the stone with no name in the floor, and then return outside to the site of the festivities to purchase a sliver of the mulberry tree under and in the shade of which ‘he’ had written so many of those fiery words that they took to memory. The slivers of mulberry that they collected challenged the amount of wood in any three trees in town. Yet, they would beg a hair of him for memory and bequeath it to their heirs forever. They had to suffice in collecting stones around the church or picking flowers wherever they could find them to press between the hallowed pages of his book also on sale everywhere.

All as planned came to pass, the grand parade of those dressed as characters in the Plays, the ass headed Bottom, a reappearance of Lear’s censored ‘Fool’, Old Gobbo blindfolded and stumbling and a horserace that swordless Richard would have given his kingdom for many times o’er. In the evening they held a Masked Ball, again character masked, that was more like those masques of Ben Jonson than of ‘his’ Authorship but ending the festive evenings with Fireworks upon Avon. However, the best laid plans of Garrick for some outdoor events were gone aglee when they were doused with a typical English rain. Garrick himself thrilled the throng with a now rare reading when he acted out his own poem called, ‘An Ode upon a building, and erecting a statue, to Shakespeare, at Stratford upon Avon’ and this was set to music by the foremost composer of the time - Thomas Arne.

This led directly to London the same year when he made a conquest as ‘Richard III’ at the age of 24. Southerne (1660-1746) was another dramatist who was born since the revival of plays by Davenant and knew only those plays produced since. Dryden wrote prologues and epilogues for several of his plays. His ‘Oroonoko’ and ‘The Fatal Marriage’ were adapted from novels of the writer Aphra Behn and when the latter play was revived in 1782 under the title, ‘Isabella’, Sarah Kemble Siddons played her famous title role. During the following six months, Garrick assumed 18 different roles and in the next five years, between 1742 and 1747. He appeared at the three principal theatres, the Smock Alley in Dublin and at Covent Garden and Drury Lane in London, becoming co-manager and owner of the Drury Lane at the age of 30.

David Garrick as Sir William Davenant before him, was more than an actor producer, he was the 18th century’s showman. To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the ‘birth’ of ‘Shake speare’ in 1769, he not only produced plays for the festive occasion but organized the events in Stratford that began yet another revival of interest in the dramas of this ‘Shake speare’ in a jubilee of three days drawing supporters to the town that most had never thought about visiting This was the apocryphal place where the ‘Author’ was born, the mythical man whom no one cared to look for his roots in this town. This was 1769 and the man whom the biographers, Rowe and others, assumed was the true Author was born in 1564 according to the documents that no one made any effort to find at the Records Office at Stratford in those 150 years.

He then determined to make the Plays of the Folio totally popular in the country over the following 20 years by producing 24 of the 36 plays and by 1766 rarely appearing on stage but retaining his interests and management of the Drury Lane Theatre.

Fortunately for the Theatre, Garrick decided to be an actor, his 1741 professional debut being at Ipswich in “Oroonoko or the Royal Slave’ by Thomas Southerne

David Garrick also knew the power of the press and his calculations proved him to be the master publicist as the newspapers took the bait as he had planned and they mocked the obviously false charade and they printed cartoons of it throughout the country, all publicity for Garrick all across Europe. Garrick had invented the Summer Arts Festival while he gave to Stratford a tourist boost to remain for centuries. He had the wrong year for the Birthday of the Bard but no one considered accuracy when the Man from Stratford was concerned.

Garrick, as the century’s showman, staged a deception in having one of his actors assume the overly fastidious appearance of a French dandy to express the sentiments of a particular person’s place and time as the theatre critic who held that the Author was irrelevant, claiming that the Author was totally overvalued, unsophisticated and coarse to which Garrick then came forth articulately to the Author’s defence and blew away his straw man bringing forth derisive laughter from the crowd.

Garrick conquered the country with 17 roles from the Folio and gave a series of farewell performances with his more ‘natural’ portrayals and he introduced London to the work of other authors including ‘Voltaire’s ‘Zaire’, Ben Jonson’s ‘Every Man in his Humour’, ‘Sir John Vanbrugh’s ‘The Provoked Wife’ and his own written plays, ‘Miss in Her Teens’ and ‘The LyingInValet’.1776, he sold his ownership shares in the Drury Lane Theatre to Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751 1816), the dramatist, and to Sheridan’s father in law, where they produced 26 year-old Sheridan’s plays, ‘The School for Scandal’ in 1777 and ‘The Critic’ in 1779. Sheridan, educated at Oxford, had written in 1775 two comic works, ‘The Rivals’ and an opera, ‘The Duenna’ with music written by this father in law, Thomas Linley (1732 95), a collaboration as Dryden had accomplished when he wrote ‘The Indian Queen’ with his playwright father in law, Sir Robert Howard. The other English dramatist of considerable note in Garrick’s time was Oliver Goldsmith (1728 74), playwright, poet, novelist and essayist who, although with an education at Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied medicine with no degree and at the Universities of Edinburgh. Then, he started out walking through Europe while playing a flute and begging. After working as a pharmacist, physician, teacher, hack-writer of translations, essays, children’s books, while writing reviews and articles for newspapers and magazines, he finally wrote a series of ‘letters’ describing London as a foreigner would. These brought him success in literary circles where he met future friends as Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds and the statesman Edmund Burke and he joined the literary society known as The Club. Goldsmith wrote the novel, ‘The Vicar of Wakefield’ and his first play, ‘The Good Natur’d Man’ (1768), a failure that was followed by the successful ‘She Stoops to Conquer’ (1773). These two plays and Sheridan’s four to 1777 were all the plays written by talented dramatists since William Congreve’s last play in 1700 to the first plays of both Oscar Wilde in 1891 and George Bernard Shaw in English1892.poetry flourished in the 18th century with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Lamb, Hazlitt, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Swinburne and Rossetti but no similar illustrious dramatists were so inspired with the plays of ‘Shake speare’ that any reached for a quill for 192 years and so there were but a handful of plays written by remembered English dramatists from the time of Ben Jonson’s last play, ‘Bartholomew Fair’ in 1614 to the first plays of Wilde and Shaw in 1891 2, a total of 278 years. Regardless of the quality of the Folio Plays, they were the only plays available throughout 300 years but they were played upon the stages censored, slashed, rearranged and reworded with Fools forgotten and marriages misplaced.

It was Essex who wanted the specific ‘Richard II’ played in the afternoon, and over the objection of the players who said that it was too old a play and that they would have to rehearse it specially and so the players were offered more money. Essex chose the play as it contained an attack upon a reigning monarch and wanted to strike a bold threat. There was no indication at the time that the play was considered to be by ‘Shake speare’ as that claim was made after the Folio in 1623 and no author would be involved in this or any other event. The acting companies owned the plays and authors did not run about bargaining or giving their consent for single productions.

There were few if any important biographers of the Author after the initial myths and musings about a young village lad that Nicholas Rowe included in his volumes of 1709 until the 19th and the 20th centuries that teemed with biographers who continued the fables of Rowe that as a dramatist, ‘Shake speare’ could do no wrong, and was lauded and praised for the unique unmatched structure of his plays. As a ‘man’, the name was imagined to be a ‘well liked’ man who was described as attending every royal function, being present at every known event and to be a respected, wealthy man in Stratford long before the first inquisitive member of the Shakespeare Society went to the town and looked into the town records in the middle of the 19th century and found the scant information of this villager, then combined it with the name ‘Shake speare’ that appeared on a few Folios. During the 20th century biographers linked the name further with imagined occupations actor, owner of the players’ company, best selling poet with a titled patron all without one supporting document

There were ‘documents discovered’ during the 19th century that happened to ‘prove’ those particular imagined offices and so those envisions continued in later biographies for more than a century after these same ‘documents’ were proved as forgeries concocted by two clever but highly regarded men in English society, one a prominent member of the Shakespeare Society, and this prevented any suspicion for years as no other member could accuse a gentleman of fraud.As late as April of 2007, these unproved rumours of 150 years are reprinted in a national magazine in the United States and written by ‘a professor of Shakespeare’ and the editor of an edition of the ‘Complete Works’, one who has what everyone else has, full availability to the ‘biographies’ of the 20th century on the Author.

More than one biographer has stated that the timbers were ‘ferried across the Thames’, but this occurred in late December and early January when the Thames froze over every year and the theatre parts were drawn across the ice on sleds with our Willy assisting. No dramatist was ever involved with the workings of any theatre company but some cannot pass by an opportunity to have their William show his ability to pacif y an unruly situation. Another such occasion when biographers have brought Willy to the fore is when there was an attempt to close the Globe. The only link was that a bill of ownership had a name similar to Shaxper upon it.

Biographers continue to claim that ‘Shake speare’ was on hand at several events that are known to have taken place where tempers rose and threats were made when the Burbadge’s ‘Theatre’ was dismantled outside the city walls and the timbers taken across the Thames to the southern shore to build the ‘Globe’ in 1599.

“The commissioning of the performance of Richard II on the eve of the Essex rebellion suggests that the Tacitean faction still considered Shakespeare to be effectively their house dramatist in the last years of the old queen’s reign, but with his usual cunning, Shakespeare somehow managed to throw off the association.” [with Essex]. Essex was executed, and Southampton was sent to the Tower, but the players got away with a reprimand. They claimed that they had put on the show only because they had been well paid to do so.”

No biographer makes such claims for other Elizabethan authors as their lives are open books.

This is first mention of this by any biographer that implies that he read this somewhere. . How would it be possible for the statement when not one of the prominent people of that age stated that he had ever seen the man who wrote ‘Hamlet’. If the Man from Stratford is implied, Richard Burbadge was living for three years after that man’s funeral and not one of the Burbadge players attended that funeral. Richard played roles in the plays of Jonson, Webster and Fletcher while all three of those playwrights were living in 1616 none made any mention of the death of ‘Shake speare’. Ben Jonson’s only mention of the word ‘Shake speare’ was found after his death in 1637 in his papers referring to ‘Shake speare’ by the one name as he did of the ancient Greek playwrights.TheModern

This is a claim that is not made for any playwright entering into any royal event and is part of the legend that refers to “Shakespeare’s own acting company”. This claim of an association of the Author with any acting company is entirely dependant upon the ‘information’ that was detailed in a 19th century forgery.

The statement that ‘the players got away with a reprimand’ is a first time claim and is false, as they had no hand in any conspiracy and had no knowledge of why this courtier wanted them to perform this ‘old play’.

“At the end of his career, writing in collaboration with John Fletcher…”

This is an allusion to biographers’ claim that the Author was well known at the Courts of both Elizabeth and James claiming that ‘Shake speare’ marched in the parade of honour to the new King James as a member of the ‘Kings Men’ for which there is no evidence.

English language received its greatest solidifying support by the man who brought Richard Garrick into London, the writer and lexicographer, Samuel Johnson who was known as Dr Johnson (1709 84) and who, after attending grammar school until he was 14, re educated himself for two years by reading from the large library of his father, a bookseller.

The only reason to say this is that a printed Quarto turned up later in what is considered ‘Shake speare’s’ career and contained the two names, but it is one of dozens of plays that were printed after 1616 with that name on the title page and so are obviously not by the Author of Hamlet. The date of 1616 applies to the Stratford man but no date is known for ‘Shake speare’.

The Author never displayed ‘usual cunning’ for which no other example is proffered and there was never any inference that any author had the remotest association with Essex. The only reason this is alluded is the again-supposed patronage of the Earl of Southampton to the man whose name is on the published poem, ‘Venus and Adonis’ wherein the author is asking for his patronage and there is no indication that Southampton gave patronage to any of the several poets who also wrote poems seeking his patronage. The biographers continue to make the claim that the Earl paid that author a thousand pounds and then refer to some purchase of land that the Man in Stratford made there for which there is documented proof.

“Shakespeare served as exemplar of the writer who achieved success, and an unprecedented degree of financial reward, from his pen alone.”

“There even seem to have been rumours early in the reign that Shakespeare and Burbage were being considered for knighthoods, an unprecedented honour for mere actors.”

No Elizabethan poet and or playwright made any “degree of financial reward from his pen alone”. This is a reference to the Man in Stratford who made a considerable reward for lending money, all of which is documented. “Shakespeare learned the language and manners of courtier ship and his characters came to speak and to gesture, as well as to be dressed, in the manner of monarchs and their entourage.”

Dr. Johnson provided the word, then its meaning, and then how that word was used by a published English writers by providing an excerpt from the writer’s work. Johnson created a single English language that standardized the meaning and the spelling of words to be used not only by Londoners but to eliminate the confusion of dialects that were spoken and written in other parts of the country so that the person attending Cambridge would have the same guide as the merchant in Stratford where, until Johnson, the populace was speaking an ‘English’ almost or totally incomprehensible to anyone in the 21st century and perhaps to most Londoners at the time.

26 Johnson thereby increased his expertise in the Latin language through the reading of Latin literature. He then attended Pembroke College, Oxford University but left without taking a degree for the lack of money. He thereupon taught at a small school in Leicestershire

At the age of 26 he married at widow 21 years senior to him and with her money, he opened a boarding school near Litchfield, but soon had to close the school when it failed. He, and the young student David Garrick went to London where his regular anonymous writings appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine. Later, when his name was revealed, he earned the acclaim of Alexander Pope who tried three times unsuccessfully to grant him the mastership of a grammar school. His failure was to the fortune of the English language as while earning a living as a hack writer for booksellers, he was asked by a group of them to compile ‘a Dictionary of the English language’ in 1747.

There was already a Dictionary in 1721 by Nathan Bailey but Johnson was to form a dictionary that would be the ‘arbiter of the language’ and not merely a collection of English words. He knew very little of language as used in the early periods but through his far reaching and continued reading of the voluminous 17th century literature, both poetry and prose, he was able to construct a Dictionary that would state the proper meaning of words and the proper construction of English sentences and to establish a single pronunciation for each word that up to this time was lacking.

In Elizabethan times and into the 18th century until Dr Johnson, words were spelled as they were pronounced and any variety of spellings that sounded the same were used and so, in print or in old letters it was prevalent to see the same words spelled differently. Into the 20th century it was generally considered that spelling did not matter in Elizabethan times when the various versions of ‘Shakespeare’ were noted. However, spelling did matter as it was to provide the correct sound of the word and ‘Shake speare’, as it was hyphenated on the Quartos, indicated that the two syllables represented a hard ‘a’ and a hard ‘ee’ and ‘speer’ and ‘spear’ were also permitted.Later writers dropped the final ‘e’ in the name until it was replaced in the 20th century to indicate how the word was spelled ‘originally’ but the word found other spellings on other original‘ShakeQuartos.speare’ with the hard vowels in Elizabethan times was not confused with a similar name that was spelled otherwise but to express the same obvious pronunciation of ‘Shacks per’ or ‘Shax per’ with neither vowel being a hard vowel nor either syllable having an ending ‘e’. Every authentic document concerning the Stratford family is spelled to be pronounced as ‘Shax’ per, death certificates and marriage licences, all town records relating to William’s father, his brothers and to his own marriage. No one in the Stratford family varied the pronunciation nor did anyone in the family for future generations after 1616 make any comment that their William had ever written anything including a letter or his will.

The latest of many examples at the end of the 20th century of this unnecessary substitution is the universal use of ‘impact’ for both the noun, ‘effect’, and the verb, ‘affect’, resulting in ‘impact’, a strong word audibly, meaning ‘collision, or the forcible momentary contact of a moving body with another body, moving or at rest’ to mean only ‘effect’ meaning, ‘result or consequence’ and ‘effect’ has no degree and must be used with a modifying word to convey the intended meaning as “It had a devastating effect upon him and he never forgot it” or ‘It had little effect upon him, and he thought no more about it”. The use of ‘impact’ is confusing when used in other tenses. “It impacted him very little” or ‘It impacted on him not at all” or “It had a negative impact”. Why is this powerful sounding word with a uniquely powerful image in meaning of ‘collision’ used to mean ‘little’ or ‘nothing’ ?

27 Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, unlike any before him, could be owned and used by everyone, layman and writer, as a standard for grammatical forms, spelling and pronunciation and to weed out all forms of slang, colloquialisms and, particularly, misunderstandings of the meaning of the words that were used improperly and to indicate them as such to be avoided when writing and advisedly when speaking in proper discourse. Finally, proper English could be used in proper taste. Johnson stated: “When I took the first survey of m y undertaking, I found our speech copious without order, and energetic without rules: Wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to disentangle and confusion to be regulated.” This did not mean nor did Johnson mean his Dictionary to be the ‘be all and end all’ of the English language. He knew and admitted that the language would grow in vocabulary and expression but there should be reason and uniformity to its expansion, and not a continuation of ignorance of meaning, or of the words’ derivation from their Greek, their Latin, their French or their Teutonic roots. As Johnson admitted: “No Dictionary of a living tongue can ever be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away”.

Those complaining in the 21st century of being corrected in their language construction usually say incorrectly that the language is always ‘changing’ and present Chaucer as an example of that ‘change’. The ‘change’ came through Dr. Johnson, from the casting away a cacophony of tongues over the country to a recognized and dependable standard for a unified language in sentence construction, as well as for word meaning and unified spelling and pronunciation and the purpose is for the reason of language, for one person to convey thoughts to another through speech or writing when all understand the form of the speaking and the meaning conveyed by the use of the chosen words.

As conveyed by Johnson, there will be additions to the vocabulary when new words are needed for inventions, discoveries and creations but the haphazard adoption of current words already with their precise meaning to be substituted for other words with their clearly understood meanings and for those improperly used words to be used universally to the banishment of the others is unnecessary and ultimately confusing.

Samuel Johnson mentions that there will be ‘’some’ words ‘falling away’ as there rightly should as many phrases are still used that were properly used when they began a century or more ago. The foremost of these is ‘by and large’ that no one can decline in the sentence and the learning student could wonder why ‘and large’, why both ‘by’ and ‘large’ while no one using the phrase knows what it means and that they have only heard the phrase and feel that that is what is necessary to use on occasion. The phrase is a nautical phrase and has always been decried by seamen when used by people ignorant of its meaning.

The next actor producer was David Garrick acting from 1727 to 1779 and he gave a new generation the solo voice in theatre cavern of Lear, Macbeth, Benedict and Hamlet from his repertory of 17 Folio roles, yet his greatest portrayal was of Richard III. He was followed by Edmund Kean (1787 1833) acting in leading roles from 1801 to 1833 to bring alive for a still later unknowing generation the ringing voices of Hamlet, Iago, Macbeth, Richard III and his masterpiece that he introduced in 1814 at the Drury Lane Theatre, the living Shylock, that firmed his reputation as the tragedian of the Folio. Unlike his predecessors, he reached back 200 years to revive an unknown Elizabethan playwright to his London audiences, Philip Massinger’, when he played his Sir Giles Overreach in ‘A New Way to Pay Old Debts’. Kean brought his ‘Richard III’ to New York when he was 33, and gave his last performance at Covent Garden in 1833 as ‘Othello’, the year that he died at the age of 46.

The next man to command the stage in England was John Henry Brodribb (1838 1905) who made his first appearance on the stage at the age of 18 at the Lyceum Theatre at Sunderland when he took the professional name of Henry Irving.

Jonson wrote at least nine plays of which their names are well-known but he also wrote ‘’a number of comedies’ including ‘Cynthia’s Revels’ satirizing the works of others including Dekker and Marston who wrote their ‘Satiromastix’ in reply but these were far from serious subjects that required research as they were written opinions on local subjects. Jonson also wrote a number of masques for James the First in which his poetry was sung. ‘The Satyr’, ‘Masque of Beauty’ and ‘Masque of Queenes are three but these, too, were of lighter content than any of the plays of Christopher Marlowe.

Another ‘old’ phrase that should have ‘fallen away’ a century ago but has now a new life with new journalists is the useless and unnecessary phrase ‘After all’, and is noticed being used with accompanying comma to introduce the next sentence after a first statement has been made by the writer. What is meant by ‘After all’ ? Does it mean ‘After all is said and done’ ?, another old phrase.Samuel Johnson says in his edition of 1765, “Shakespeare’s plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but emotions of a distinct kind exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combinations.”

The popularity of the Folio Plays depended not upon the writing or the opinions of Dryden or Johnson but upon those few men who portrayed the great characters of the plays as living once again but upon the stage with the greatest orations to reveal their inward feelings. The initial theatre producer Sir William Davenant’s chief portrayer of the heroes, Thomas Betterton, acting from 1660 to 1710 attained great success by creating the living portrayals of Lear, Hamlet, Falstaff, Macbeth, Timon and Sir Toby Belch to an audience that had never heard them before.

The Elizabethan dramatist, Philip Massinger (1583 1640), had written fifteen plays as a sole author and had co authored other plays with Thomas Dekker and John Fletcher, and also with Nathaniel Field (1587 1633) and Cyril Tourneur who are not known today. No other Elizabethan dramatist had written more than six to ten plays in his lifetime.

The producer of plays, William Davenant, had introduced for the first time in forty years, some of the plays of Ben Jonson and John Fletcher along with some of the Folio plays but it is unknown if any of the plays of Marlowe were known, or those of Marston, Beaumont or Kyd. Plays by other dramatists including Davenant were presented on stage, most whose names are forgotten or never mentioned today. It is also unknown whether any of the more that 30 plays, that were published throughout the 17th century from 1640 that contained the name ‘Shake speare’ as author but were not in the Folio, the true authors of which are not now known

After playing at Dublin, Edinburgh, London and Liverpool, he spent five years at Manchester and throughout his apprenticeship lasting ten years, he played more than 400 roles in 330 plays including most of the Folio plays. In 1866, he moved to London, married in 1869 and was successful in two long running plays at the Lyceum where he remained as an actor for 28 years while taking over the Lyceum in 1877 as lessee and manger for 21 years. In his productions of some of the Folio plays, he was the first actor manager to present the plays with the full scripts as in the Folio, no longer in mutilated versions of excisions and substituted words and situations. Irving also elaborated his sets and costumes to give more visual interest in his productions and he brought greater dignity and magnetism to his personal performances of all his roles. In 1878, he engaged Ellen Terry with whom he began a famous partnership for 27 years until 1905. Together they played Hamlet and Ophelia, Shylock and Portia. The many other plays they did together had no literary merit and this disturbed the theatre critic, G.B. Shaw, who urged Irving to consider the important work being written by Henrik Ibsen but Irving could see no purpose in changing his popular choice of successful plays so Shaw turned to Ellen Terry for assistance. She went as far as reading to Irving the first two acts of Ibsen’s ‘John Gabriel Borkman’ but Irving had no interest in listening further to what he called ‘threadworms and leeches’. By this, Shaw and Irvin fell out of friendship. In 1895, Irving was the first person of the theatre to be knighted and this only heightened Shaw’s contempt.

Irving firmly believed that his popular success was through his personal performances and not by the content of the plays that he produced and had years of overwhelming success to verify that. Shaw’s first play was produced in 1892 and he and Ibsen were the first playwrights to bring a change to what was the actor’s theatre that relied upon performances regardless of the author and to create the author’s theatre where the actors were judged not upon their versatility to play great heroes of the past on one night and to raise laughter in a raucous comedy on the next, most of which were minor fodder for an evening and dinner out as Irving also instituted regular aftershow festivities with food and wine, but actors would be judged upon how faithful they were to the intent and purpose of the playwright. After 1900, destiny suddenly changed for Irving as public interest in his company waned and he desperately turned to productions of ‘Coriolanus’ and a play by the French playwright Victorean Sardou on Dante, heroic figures that had always be successful in the past, but they failed as did Irving who could not sustain the loss further and in 1902 his company closed. He had intended to make acting a respected profession, the man who was the most influential person of English Theatre in the Victorian era. John Henry Brodribb was buried in Westminster Abbey.

The long era of the adoration of stage portrayals of ancient heroes was over and Theatre in the Edwardian era turned to drama that revealed the inner feelings of ‘ordinary’ individuals and the influence of their society around them. This was made possible by the greater flow of plays coming from Norway’s Henrik Ibsen, considered to be the ‘father of Modern Drama’ and from England’s first playwright of the twentieth century but who died in 1900, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, (1854-1900) whose first play, ‘Vera’ was written in 1881 and produced in New York City in 1892 and this was followed by five other plays from 1891 to 1895.

From 1900, with the introduction of musical theatre, more plays from outside Britain were introduced and with the further productions of Oscar Wilde’s plays from 1891 and with those of George Bernard Shaw from the year 1892, the reliance on the Plays of the Folio lessened greatly and the new actors played far fewer of the Folio Plays while retaining their most outstanding characters for special occasions.

Georgina Drew bore Maurice three children within five years, Lionel (1878 1954), Ethyl (1879 1959) and John (1882 1942) with Ethyl following Lionel to the New York stage one year after his debut in 1893 in which he appeared in ‘The Road to Ruin’ with his grandmother, Louisa Lane Drew.

Also in Victorian England two other great names in British Theatre began family lines of famous actors. One was the Booths, with Junius Brutus Booth (1796 1852) making his acting debut in 1813 but from 1817 to 1820 continued his tragic roles at Covent Garden Theatre in London before emigrating to the United States where he was a brilliant and leading actor and the father to two sons who also commanded national attention on the American stage. The first was Edwin Thomas Booth (1833 93) who debuted in Boston at the age of 16 and toured California with his father three years later, and appeared in Australia until 1856. In 1561 he made his first acting appearance in England, then he managed the Winter Garden Theatre in New York City from 1863 to 1865. Returning to England in 1880, he alternated repertory performances with Henry Irving. Edwin Booth was considered to be the finest actor of tragedy in America and was most famous for his portrayal of ‘Hamlet’. He, his father and his younger brother appeared together in many memorable performances of ‘Julius Caesar’.

Edwin’s younger brother was John Wilkes Booth (1838 1865), his name taken from the British statesman, John Wilkes, from whom his father, Junius, was descended through the father’s mother. John from 1860 to 1863 successfully acted Folio roles but the stage appearance that he is remembered for was when he leaped to the stage floor of the Ford Theatre from a loge above after firing a bullet into the back of Abraham Lincoln’s head on the evening of April 14, 1865 in the City of Washington. The theatrical expression ‘break a leg’ may have begun that night when Booth broke his when he jumped down onto the stage.

The dependence upon the Folio plays to captivate audiences lessened as the years from 1850 continued and contrasted with the almost complete dependence throughout the 18th century. Henry Irving had roles in 330 plays in the ten years that he was an apprentice actor and then acted for another 39 years only occasionally appearing in his favourite roles of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Shylock’ with Ellen Terry. The three members of the Booth family played ‘Julius Caesar’ together with its several featured roles for men and Edwin was most famous for his ‘Hamlet’ but their long careers did not depend upon the Folio plays.

The other ‘Theatre Family’ of actors was the Blythes who like the Booths began as English and then became American. Herbert Blythe (1847 1905) lived almost exactly contemporary with John Henry Brodribb (1838 1905), and though born in India, he was educated at ‘Marlowe’s’ Cambridge and after appearing briefly on the English stage, he emigrated to America in 1875 at 28 to play in ‘Under the Gaslight’ in New York City. The following year he married Georgina Emma Drew who was the daughter of the actor John Drew and in his career he acted as leading man for Minnie Maddern Fiske, the British actress Lillie Langtry and the Polish actress Helena Modjeska for whom he wrote the play, ‘Nadjeska’, in which she appeared in 1884. Herbert Blythe, throughout his career, took the stage name, ‘Maurice Barrymore’.

30 Ibsen had written eight plays before the successful ‘Peer Gynt’ in 1867 that contained music by Edvard Grieg in the 1876 production, followed by fourteen more before 1899, a remarkable total of 24 plays unmatched in English Theatre history, except for the ‘36 plays in the Folio’. Shaw wrote on subjects that are universal and their words have retained significance for over a hundred years, many of the plays seeming to the newcomer to them as if they had been written the year before, the satire and the humour still relevant. George Bernard Shaw wrote a prodigious total of 55 outstanding plays.

When two theatre families combined again on stage. Louisa Lane (1820 1897) had come from a family of 18th century actors and had married an Irish comedian, John Drew, and three of their children followed them onto the stage, John Jr, Sidney and Georgina Drew. Lionel appeared in motion pictures as early as 1907 long before leaving the stage in 1925 for another career in motionEthylpictures.Barrymore made her debut also in New York City in 1894 in ‘The Rivals’ by the English playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, then played opposite Sir Henry Irving in 1898. Her first triumphs were ‘A Doll’s House’ by Ibsen in 1905, and “Alice Sit by the Fire’ by the British dramatist, James Barrie, in 1906. As a foremost actress in American theatre, she portrayed Juliet (1922), Ophelia and Portia (1925), then in 1928, opened the Ethyl Barrymore Theatre appearing in “The Kingdom of God’. She starred in ‘School for Scandal’ by Sheridan (1931) and in the Emlyn Williams’ play, ‘The Corn is Green’ from 1941 to 1945. She and her two brothers appeared together in the motion picture, ‘Rasputin’ in 1933.

John Barrymore’s debut in 1903 was not in a Folio play but in Hermann Sudermann’s ‘Magda’ in Chicago. His appearances in Australia, England and the United States made him the most famous actor of his time with personal triumphs in John Galsworthy’s ‘Justice’ in 1910, ‘The Jest’ of Sem Bellini in 1919, and finally after 17 years of acting, ‘Richard III’ in 1920 and ‘Hamlet’ in 1924 5. In the 1930s, he repeated his ‘Hamlet’ in a complete version in New York that began in the late afternoon, took two hours for dinner, and returned for the completion at 8. The performance was considered the best of the century.

In the 1890s, G.B. Shaw was the ‘Saturday Review’s severe theatre critic of the over exposure of maudlin plays along with the excesses of what he called ‘servile puffery’. He was as repulsed by the inappropriate staging that was the pride of Henry Irving with his ‘sweet music’ from the orchestra, over lavish costumes and insistent styles interrupted by spectacular effects. Water scenes on stage were ‘all the rage’ as well as living horses and battles with real guns, anything to attract the crowds and from old prints, it is obvious that line ups outside extended for blocks with people of all ages crowding to enter.

As he had urged Irving to turn to Ibsen, he supported those new English dramatists who wrote of ordinary individuals. Harley Granville Barker was both actor and producer of plays being the creator of the part of Marchbanks in Shaw’s ‘Candida’ in 1900, the first of his many Shaw characters to come. He managed the Court Theatre in London from 1904 to 1907 producing many of the Folio Plays and those of Shaw in England and in America. He was also the author of several plays between 1901 and 1910, the Edwardian Decade including ‘Waste’ (1907) and ‘The Madras House’ (1910)

Another author that Shaw supported, St John Hankin (1869 1909), wrote five plays that were produced by two progressive new theatre companies in London from 1903 to 1906 and that were as incisive as those of Shaw and his subjects were the almost internecine relationships within families.

Describing a performance of ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ in which the producer had provided a thunderstorm on stage with water raining down, Shaw wrote, “immediately after which Valentine enters and delivers his speech sitting down on a bank of moss, as an outlaw in tights naturally would after a terrific shower”. Throughout most plays, the audience would hiss and boo at actions that they considered outrageous. Shaw saved his reactions for the ‘Saturday Review’ but they were as damaging as the hisses. If the star actor, Beerbohm Tree, flicked his wrist as ‘Falstaff’, Shaw’ retorted in print, “No doubt, in the course of a month or two, when he begins to pick up a few of the lines of the part, he will improve on his first effort… Mr Tree might as well try to play Juliet.”

Shaw was thoroughly immersed in ‘Shake spear’ as a youth in Ireland as he wrote, “When I was twenty I knew everybody in Shakespear, from Hamlet to Abhorson, much more intimately than I knew my living contemporaries, and to this day, if the name of Pistol or Polonius catches my eye in a newspaper, I turn to the passage with more curiosity than if the name were that of but perhaps I had better not mention any one in particular.”

The late 19th century biographers and particularly the 20th century biographers who, unlike anyone before them, knew the details of the William Shaxper of Stratford’s birth, marriage and the date of his burial and they knew that he had lived to the age of 52. Biographers then claimed that in ‘those days’ anyone at the age of 52 was ‘old’, but when the Stratford man was known to have ‘retired’ from his active business interests several years before, biographers then had to claim that ‘Shake speare’ ceased several years before 1616 the year the Stratford man was buried ‘in the church’, information never sought and so never known until the last half of the 1800’s.

Alas, for the English theatre, Hankin at the age of 39, ‘made a hole in the water’ as Shaw expressed it and Shaw described Hankin’s death as ‘a public calamity’. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries ‘comedy’ was distinctly separated from ‘tragedy’ to the extent of producers having their writers invent happy endings for Folio tragedies. Hankin was one of the first modern playwrights to combine comedy with tragedy, his serious play, ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, having the subtitle ‘a comedy for fathers’ and his equally serious, ‘The Cassilis Engagement’ having the subtitle ‘a comedy for mothers’. Hankin’s plays have had little production throughout the 20th century with only a single production of one play in Canada before the Shaw Festival’s revival of two in 2001 and 2007. Hankin with five excellent plays is not listed in the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopaedia whereas Granville-Barker with almost as few plays written is listed Shaw had a divided opinion of the Folio Plays, which he naturally thought of as being of ‘Shakespear’ and he possibly never thought about whether there was a man with that name and he never mentioned if he doubted that the Man from Stratford was the Author. When he became a critic of Theatre and saw the Irving productions of some of the Folio Plays, his sense of how a play should be constructed was heightened and through his readings of the Plays, he was more critical of the Althoughwriting.Shaw considered Henry Irving a genius in many ways, he felt that Irving’s genius was being wasted with his poor choice of plays and by his over productions of the Folio Plays that included too elaborate staging with horses, water showers and hand held electric lights carried by Titania’s fairies.

Shaw considered far worse than these were the slashed Folio texts that divulged Irving’s poor opinion of them, Irving’s poor use of Ellen Terry’s talent and his own perverse acting all of which contributed to ‘costly Bardicide’. Of the plays themselves, Shaw considered ‘As You Like It’ as “canting snivelling, hypocritical unctuousness” and as he declared in a review of ‘Cymbeline’, that it was “vulgar, foolish, offensive, indecent, and exasperating beyond all tolerance”. He had declared, “With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespear when I measure my mind against his”.

The Stratford man lived longer than his brothers and several members of his family but many famous contemporaries lived into their late seventies or into their eighties. Of the many foremost contemporary dramatists, Philip Massinger (1582-1640) lived 57 years.

Many dramatists lived longer than the ‘old age of 52 years’ and they continued to write plays during these same years until 1641 when the last one was buried: - Philip Massinger, 57, John Marston, 59; Thomas Dekker, 60; Ben Jonson, 64; Thomas Heywood, 67, and George Chapman,These75.were twenty one dramatists living and working in London Theatre for the only small groups of players of the Burbadge brothers of the Curtain, Theatre, and Globe theatre buildings and of Philip Henslowe of the Rose Theatre, all dramatists working from 1585 until long past 1616 and not one of these men ever mentioned knowing a ‘William Shakespeare’ either as a poet or dramatist or as a money lender or as a neighbour.

Samuel Daniel (1562 1619) was a poet educated at Oxford, appointed master of revels at the court of James I who wrote many court masques, a major prose history of England, a book of sonnets and was criticized sharply by Ben Jonson. Henry Constable (1562 1613) educated at Cambridge developed the English sonnet. Henry Wotton (1568 1639), poet and diplomat, was a close friend of John Donne (1573-1631), the Oxford poet and lawyer, who was secretary to Sir Thomas Eggerton, the keeper of the Great Seal, (1540 1617) (77 years). Two other poets were George Wither (1588 1667) (79 years) and Robert Herrick (1591 1674) (83 years) who went to Cambridge. Poet Sir Walter Ralegh, writing his ‘History of the World’ up to his death, was 66 when he was executed. Of the two greatest poets of those years was Edmund Spenser (1554 1586) (32) in the service of Robert Dudley, the Queen’s Earl of Leicester who was introduced by Sir Walter Ralegh, a poet and historian, to the other great poet Philip Sidney (1552 1599). Sidney and Spenser were Cambridge graduates. No one by the name of ‘William Shake speare’ who is , claimed to be ‘old at 52’, is listed as attending Oxford or Cambridge. “Heminge and Condell’ inform the ‘Readers’ of the 1632 Folio that the author is “by death departed” but no date is stated, nor do these ‘names’ say where the man lived or where he is buried, all as late as 1632, 16 years after the departure of the Man of Stratford. In the 1623 Folio, the title page reads, “Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies. Published according to the True Original Copies”. ‘True Original’ is to confirm that the words are not taken from ‘Quartos’, several of which were known to have been for sale over the years and had contained the words ‘by William Shake speare’ but no more than eight times, and now 36 Plays were contained within the Folio, some never before known to be by ‘Shake speare’. The frontispiece also states that these words are taken not from original manuscripts but from ‘original copies’. These ‘copies’ and all ‘original manuscripts’ were not kept and no longer exist.

Elizabethan London had poets and writers who never wrote plays. Thomas Campion (1567 1620), London bred and educated at Cambridge, was a poet, musician and a London physician with a large practice. He wrote four books of ‘Ayres’ over seventeen years and ‘A New Way of Making Four Parts in Counterpoint’, but is best known for ’Cherry Ripe’ among his books of poems. No one called ‘Shake speare’ was among his patients.

He was born at Salisbury and educated at the University of Oxford and when he came to London in 1606, he collaborated with several other English dramatists, Nathaniel Field (1587 1633), Thomas Dekker (1572-1632), John Fletcher (1679-1625) and Cyril Tourneur (?). Lesser known but also active drama collaborators were Thomas Middleton (1580 1627) and William Rowley (1585 1637). These dramatists knew each other and worked with each other and were well acquainted with all of the other dramatists and their work. Many lived truncated lives: Christopher Marlowe, 29; Robert Greene and Francis Beaumont, 32; George Peele and Thomas Kyd, 38; Thomas Lodge, 43; John Webster, 45; Nathaniel Field and John Fletcher, 46; Thomas Middleton, 47; Michael Drayton, 50; John Lyly, John Ford and William Rowley, 52.

34 According to the dictionary, “Originally”, as with this 1623 Folio, “the frontispiece contained a picture or drawing”. The frontispiece does contain a ‘picture or drawing’, a printing of an engraving of a man with very high forehead, a very slight moustache and no beard. Below are the words, “London. Printed by Isaac Iaggard, and Ed. Blount. 1623.” Jaggard is spelled with a ‘I’ as the printing did at that time. Edward Blount was not a ‘printer’ but was the man who ‘published’ them and who was a friend of Christopher Marlowe and who published his plays. Opposite and to the left of this title page is a verse ‘To the Reader’ under which the author’s initials are printed, “B. I.”, the ‘I’ standing for ‘J’, or the initials of Ben Jonson. The verse begins, “This figure, that thou here seest put, It was for gentle Shakespeare cut wherein the Grauer had a strife with Nature, to out-doo the life: O, could he but have drawne his wit As well in brasse, as he hath hit His face, the Print would then surpasse All, that vvas euer vvrit in brasse. But since he cannot, Reader, looke Not on his Picture, but his Booke.”

Many contemporary people other than people at Court had their portraits painted including Christopher Marlowe, actors Richard Burbadge (1567 1619) and William Sly, Marlowe’s actor. Ned Alleyn, Michael Drayton, and Ben Jonson of whom two portraits exist. There are, among others, engravings in original books of Michael Drayton from the portrait and of George Chapman in his ‘The Works of Homer’ taken from a portrait. If there were a person called ‘W.S.’, he, being as ‘famous’ as later claimed, either would have had a portrait painted or since the Folio Plays were intended to be published throughout those 26 years as all original manuscripts or all ‘original copies’ were kept throughout those years, would have been asked to have a portrait painted for the Folio. If it were known that the Man of Stratford was the Author and that man had died in 1616 without a portrait, it would have been effortless to have a portrait painted of the bust at the church if by no one other than the man who had formed it from a death mask, Gheeraerts. This was not accomplished or attempted and should indicate that no one in London knew the Stratford man and so all depended upon the artist, Martin Droeshout, to form in some manner a ‘typical’ early 17th century man in doublet and high white collar that were popular in the era as illustrated by the portrait of the gentlemen seated on both sides of a table who negotiated the ‘Spanish Peace’. Of the five English delegates seated on the right side of the table, the two nearest and facing the artist are Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton and the nearest, Robert Cecil, Viscount of Cranborne in the painting by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. The face of either of these two gentlemen could have been copied to represent ‘Shake speare’ and both are more similar to later portraits presented to be ‘Shakespeare’ than the Droeshout engraving, including the portrait first presented by Sir William Davenant, known now as the ‘Chandos’, and others now with fuller beards and moustaches and smaller and softer white collars. The faces of Howard and Cecil are similar to these later ‘pictures’ of ‘Shake speare’ both having slim faces, slight moustaches and goatees, slightly high foreheads and similarly dressed with the customary frilled white collar.

Since no one knew the name ‘William Shake speare’ except by the name appearing on eight Quartos in the years between 1598 and 1609, and no one had ever met anyone by that name, it may have been considered to be of assurance to print a picture of the ‘Author’ that Jonson says was ‘cut’ and ‘writ in brass’ or a brasscut and not a woodcut.

This ‘cut’ was proven in the latter part of the 20th century to have been a tracing of a portrait of Queen Elizabeth and, by overlay and on a computer, it was found that the main features of eyes and mouth are exactly along those in the Elizabeth picture and the original of this ‘cut’.

Robert Greene, shortly before he died in 1592, wrote a leaflet, ‘A Groatsworth of Wit’, complaining about a certain actor whom he called ‘an upstart crow’ and 20th century biographers maintain that he was referring to ‘W.S.’ as they were looking for some document that placed ‘William’ in action in some manner before 1597 and this would establish him as an actor for which there was no evidence other than forged papers of the 19th century. Greene does not mention anyone by name in the papers but was addressing three fellow dramatists warning them about the money that actors were making from the dramatists’ work and playwrights were not paid for each performance as actors were. Henry Chettle had edited the copy for the printer and had made some changes to “stroke out what there in conscience I thought he in some displeasure writ; or had it been true, yet to publish it was intolerable”. One of those whom Greene was addressing in the paper, Thomas Nashe, was infuriated that his name was associated with libel and wrote a denial. “I am advertised that a scald triviall lying pamphlet, called Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit is given out to be of my doing. God never have care of my soule, but utterly renounce me, if the least words of sillible in it proceeded from my pen, or if I were any way privie to the writing or printing of it.” The complaint of Nashe further testifies that poet and dramatists could and did complain publicly if their names were used improperly or were missing from their work. There was never any published complaint or denial from ‘W.S.’ though present biographers have insinuated that William complained in this instance in which he was not named and about the ‘Passionate Pilgrime’ book about which there is no document of complaint or comment.Marlowe’s

35 In the Third Folio of 1663/4, another play was printed as being by the Author, ‘The Yorkshire Tragedy’, claimed to be written in 1608 and telling the tale of the true case of 1605, that of Walter Calverley, a gambler who murdered his family and who was pressed to death under stones. None of the 36 plays concerned a recent subject and this tragedy is now thought to have been written by Thomas Middleton. The printings of the era contain many instances where the contents were ascribed to one author when they were the works of several other authors, ‘The Passionate Pilgrime’ being but one. This book of poems was printed by William Jaggard in 1599 and he gave ‘by Shakespeare’ as author of all of the poems but it contained poems by Marlowe, Ralegh; Richard Barnfield and Bartholomew Griffin. When it was reprinted in 1612, it contained an added poem by Thomas Heywood who complained he had ‘by Shakespeare’ been removed from the title page. It is because of Heywood’s complaint that this fraud was revealed to later ages. In both editions Marlowe’s most known poetry, ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’, was included but without the fourth and sixth verses and it was also credited as ‘by Shakespeare’. It is unknown whether William Jaggard knew the rightful authors or if he picked up ‘manuscripts’ or written copies of the poems and assumed that they were ‘by S’ or if he considered that it mattered not at all in that time when copyrights were unknown. It was up to the original authors to complain and many were deceased when the poems were printed.

Jaggard may have considered the name ‘Shakespeare’ quite legitimate and safe as the name had appeared on the occasional play Quarto and on two long poems and there had been no complaints although no one that he or anyone else knew was called ‘W.S.’.

pastoral song, ‘Passionate Shepherd’ had been quoted in a play called ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ and ‘Come live with me and be my love’ was reprinted along with additions and alterations in ‘England’s Helicon’ anthology in 1600 and later still in 1655, it appeared in Walton’s ‘Complete Angler’ again with further variations in both books. It was rightfully assigned to Marlowe in both and each was accompanied by Walter Ralegh’s poem, “Nymph’s Reply’. Another 16th century Commonplace Book held both poems with still different variations.

No proper regard to legitimate authors was given in many published books from the 17th to the 19th centuries as in 1850 there appeared a publication called ‘Notes and Queries’ under a title ‘Marlowe’s Autograph’ in which the author claims to have a copy of a Henry Howard translation transcribed by Paul Thompson, followed by sixteen sonnets signed “Ch. M.” and two of the sonnets allude to a portrait painter named ‘Seager’. The author asked for any information as to the name of the poet, ‘Ch. M’. There seemingly was no reply and ‘Paul Thompson’ was not found in the original manuscript of Henry Howard’s translation in the Cottonian Collection in the British Museum. There were two Seager brothers who were portrait painters at the time of Marlowe. In the late 1800s a forger issued several imitation poems, one ‘Atheist’s Tragedy’ in the ‘antique vein’ containing supposed incidents in Marlowe’s life. In 1600, a translation of Lucan’s ‘First Book’ was printed with the title page stating the author to be Marlowe with an ‘Introduction’ written by Thomas Thorpe who piratically published the ‘Sonnets’ of ‘Shake speare’. Thorpe dedicated the book to ‘Edward Blount’ whose name is on the First Folio title page and who published works by Marlowe and who is known to have spoken tributes to him. This claimed ‘translation’ ‘by Marlowe’ is not considered to be of the quality that Marlowe displayed in his ‘Hero and Leander’.

Harriot had discovered the horns of Venus, the satellites of Jupiter and the spots on the Sun. Harriott was applauded by writers of the past who said “few in his days were his equals, whilst in pure mathematics none was his superior”, “destined to make the last great discovery in the pure science of algebra …arrived at a complete theory of the genesis of equations”. Yet, those who did not understand him considered him as ‘the Queen’s Magician’ and when Ralegh stood before Chief Justice Popham, that Justice insulted Ralegh by accusing him of having been “bedevilled by Hariot”

Marlowe’s first play in 1687, ‘Tamburlaine’, found the perfect man for the title role in the 21 year old actor Edward Alleyn who became a favourite with the playgoers. Thomas Heywood in his Prologue to another play by Marlowe who, he said, was “the best of poets in that age”, said of Alleyn “being a man whom we may rank with (doing no one wrong) Proteus for shape and Roscius for a tongue”. Ben Jonson wrote of him, “How can so great example dye in mee, That, Allen, I should pause to publish thee ? Who both thy graces in they selfe hast more Outstript, that they did all that went before”. No one wrote a line about ‘William’ as an actor and not a line as a poet other than in the Folio years long after they considered him ‘dead’. Edward Alleyn, being popular and employed, retired moderately wealthy, but placed all his own artefacts and many of Philip Henslowe’s Rose theatre articles and papers into a trust at Dulwich College. The ‘original copies’ of the Folio Plays were never held for posterity by anyone.Christopher Marlowe was a friend of Sir Walter Ralegh as all early references attest and Ralegh and his brother Carew invited their many friends to Walter’s house where they discussed what many outsiders were sure were the interests of ‘atheists’, but which others may consider the opinions of ‘Free thinkers’. These gentlemen consisted of several frequenters of the Court as was Edward Vere, the Earl of Oxford, from one of the country’s oldest families. Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, was a firm supporter of those with special talents and interests. Among the frequent and welcomed guests were the poet Matthew Royden, the mathematicians Robert Hughes and Walter Warner, and the most eminent mathematician and astronomer, Thomas Harriott, a friend of Ralegh for forty years and a stalwart up to Ralegh’s end on the gallows.

Marlowe, whose entire writing was finished before the name ‘Shake speare’ was seen upon a Quarto in 1598, came to London in 1587 with the play ‘Tamburlaine’ finished before his leaving Cambridge. It was an original play upon the tyrant, Timur the Lame, who had first attacked the Persian border 200 years before in 1379. The play’s popularity with Ned Alleyn as the lead-actor called for another play upon Tamburlaine.

Northumberland.”AfterMarlowe

Father Parsons in his ‘Responsio ad Elizabetha Edictum’, printed in 1592, the year before ‘the end of Marlowe’, berated “Sir Walter Ralegh’s school of atheism…as of the diligence used to get young gentlemen to his school, wherein both Moses and our Saviour, the Old and New Testament, are jested at, the scholars taught among things to spell God backwards” All their vituperations were imagined as none knew what was ever discussed.

However, those who did not know what they discussed had every vituperation to voice publicly against them and for every ‘biographer’ to grasp and to write of furiously in their books. They called these informal friendly get togethers ‘the School of Night’, with all the superstitious trailings of the word, ‘night’, ‘dank humours’, ‘the night air’, ‘dark mystery’. Others had specific condemnations.

‘Biographers’ of the early 1700s, upon ‘learning’ of Ralegh, Marlowe and others of the Elizabethan era, believed everything that the superstitious and the legend repeaters had to say.

John Aubrey who supplied baseless myths about ‘William’ to Anthony a Wood who was equally credulous as Aubrey was fallacious, complied with saying in print, “Harriott was unsound in religious principles and matters of belief; that he was in fact not only a deist himself, but that he exerted a baleful influence over Ralegh and his ‘History’ [of the World’] as well as over the Earl of was no longer upon the London scene, the vituperation against him continued in print. Gabriel Harvey published some abuse of Marlowe after 1593 and Thomas Nashe, the dramatist, took offence that Harvey said that he also slandered the man, and Nashe published a reply that “I never abused Marlowe in my life”. Such opinions and replies were often published in Georgeleaflets.Chapman was an close friend of Marlowe and when Marlowe left his masterpiece, ‘Hero and Leander’ unfinished in 1593, Chapman took up pen and completed it and the second edition of the idyll was published with his own ending added in 1598 after Marlowe’s was printed earlier in the year, but Chapman’s ending had none of the fire and genius of Marlowe No evidence has been found to say that ‘Shake speare’ knew anyone and certainly no poet, playwright or gentleman of the Court gave any indication that ‘he’ was a friend as they had with Christopher Marlowe.

Astronomer Robert Hughes attended Oxford with Ralegh and was supported monetarily by Henry Percy. George Chapman in his translation of Homer commends Hughes as “another right learned, honest, and entirely loved friend of mine” and refers to Harriott as “I have shewed to my worthy and most learned friend, Mr. Harriott, whose judgement and knowledge in all kinds, I know to be incomparable and bottomless”. The friends of Ralegh who discussed matters of import at his house included Ben Jonson, a Dr. Burrill, and the Rev. Gilbert Hawthorne. What they discussed was known only to those men.

The 36 Folio Plays are either re workings of stories from Italy, France, Greece or Rome or the histories of monarchs of Britain with ‘As You Like It’ claimed to be the only play with an original inspiration supposedly a disguised allusion to those who supported Ralegh and those who didChristophernot.

Marlowe then turned to the monarchs of Britain for heroic subjects, one that he worked upon was ‘The Troublesome Reigne of John, King of England’ that had been dealt with before in the time of Chaucer by John Bale, the play printed in 1538. Marlowe’s play caused excitement for the playgoers as it raised passions in a time when the Armada threatened England. This play still was popular when another version appeared in years following by the name of ‘King John’ that contained enticing lines that echoed those of Marlowe. In the 1926 edition of ‘The complete dramatic works of William Shakespeare’ the introduction to ‘King John’ by Frederick D. Losey, A.M. (Harvard), Litt.D. contains these words: “There seems to be a fatal flaw in King John, whereby, a reading of the play leaves us cold and unsatisfied. A reading of this play leaves us cold and unsatisfied. We have a sense of offended justice that so contemptible and so guilty a wretch should receive such a fair dismissal from the stage. He betrays no sign of remorse, and his death seems so disassociated from his offences. Such a treatment, accorded to such a man as John by Shakespeare, must be regarded as a fatal defect; and yet it is so obvious that it is inconceivable that Shakespeare himself would not have observed it or that he could not have corrected it with the utmost ease. Shall we say, then, as does one great critic, that in this instance Shakespeare has “left a serious blot on his drama which it is impossible to remove”.

In the opinion of one editor of the time, this play contained, “Language so strong, so terse, so dramatic, had never been heard before on the English stage”. In the view of another editor, “vigorous drawing is exchanged for caricature; for a sinister lifelike figure we have a grotesque stage Thevillain”.central figure, Barabbas, is found in his counting house describing in detail the jewels of his richness gained from those to whom he sells oils and wine but for whom he has contempt, all in his monologue that ends, “As their wealth increaseth, so inclose Infinite riches in a little room”, the last six words used by the art and literature monthly publication, ‘Coronet’, that began publication in November of 1936, to describe the booket’s contents.

These Marlowe plays were followed by ‘Doctor Faustus’ that was original at that time, and another original story, ‘The Jew of Malta’ that portrayed a man as using riches not for riches sake but to have control over others, a theme recognized in the 21st century.

The plight of Bar-abbas is more than that of Shylock as the men of the Hebrew ‘tribe’ are called before the governor and told that each is to pay one half of his estate, and those who refuse will become a Christian or relinquish all of his estate, to which Bar abbas replies: “Preach me not out of my possessions, Some Jews are wicked, as all Christians are: But say the tribe that I descended from Were all in general cast away for sin, Shall I be tried by their transgressions ? The man that dealeth righteously shall live: And which of you can charge me otherwise ?” His house is seized and transformed into a nunnery, his house from which his daughter, Abigail, is cast out, but in hopes to recover his wealth, he instructs her to offer herself as a nun. [Get thee to a nunnery] At night, he watches outside his former dwelling. Seeing his daughter, he says. “But stay, what star shines yonder in the east ? The lodestar of my life, if Abigail.” [Romeo] While his slave, Ithamore, is in the company of Bellamira, Ithamore sings: “We shall leave this paltry land, and sail from hence to Greece, to lovely Greece, I’ll be thy Jason, thou my golden fleece. Where woods and forest go in goodly green, I’ll be Adonis, thou shalt be Love’s Queen, Thou in those groves by this above, Shalt live with me and be my love.”

Some biographers of ‘William’ have over imagined to the extent of claiming that William, while ‘acting in Marlowe’s plays’, learned so many of the lines and had them so fixed in memory that they ‘unconsciously’ spilled out upon the page ‘without a blot in his papers’.

Some biographers have claimed that Marlowe ‘imitated’ or was influenced by the writing of ‘Shake speare’ ignoring that Marlowe was long ‘gone’ by the time anyone had ever read the name on a rare Quarto copy but still had never heard the name uttered by anyone nor had they seen an actor by that name. The first Folio plays to be seen and heard had so much of Marlowe that if he had written the parts strange to his established style, they were not recognized as the maturing that would be seen in any poet dramatist. This maturation is evident in Marlowe’s last completed play, “Edward the Second’.

Henslowe’s ‘Diary’ also lists ‘Doctor Faustus’ as being originally staged at the Rose in 1588 with the Lord Admiral’s men and with a revival performance listed on September 30, 1594.

Philip Henslowe, owner of the Rose theatre who produced some of Marlowe’s plays, kept his theatre ‘Diary’ that lists a play ‘Henry the Sixth’ as being acted first on March 3, 1592, and it is this play that Thomas Nashe commends in his ‘Pierce Penniless’ of 1592, “How would it have joy’d brave Talbot to thinke that after he had lyne two hundred yeare in his tombe, he should triumphe againe on the stage, and have his bones new embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least, who, in the tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.” That ‘tragedian’ was Ned Alleyn.

Where before he answered the public clamour for more ‘heroes’ and their bombasting soliloquies, he now curtailed the impulsive language and through his chosen words had the actors assume their individual characters. Marlowe’s Edward the Fourth speaks to Margaret the Queen: “Helen of Greece was fairer far than thou, although th y husband may be Menelaus; And ne’er was Agamemnon’s brother wrong’d By that false woman, as this king by thee. For what hath broach’d this tumult but thy pride ? Had’st thou been meek, our title still had slept, And we, in pity of the gentle king Had slipp’d our claim until another age.”

Marlowe then wrote another monarchic play called ‘Harry vj’, later changed to ‘Henry vi’.

The biographers are determined that the Man from Stratford was an actor without a voice from the past concurring with their speciousness. Entire lines are not so in the memory of an actor that he knows not that he read them or spoke them oft in memory and on the stage, then the Folio writer either plagiarized them knowingly or Marlowe wrote them where they are. Marlowe has repeated some of his phrases in other of his plays. His ‘trademarks’ of alliteration and alliterating sounds within the lines, similar sounding syllables wherever in the word, are undeniably Marlowe and these are found throughout the ‘Henry VI’ plays, the unmistakable print of ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’ as Ben Jonson noted. Late 19th century and early 20th century ‘experts’ argued and could not agree which lines of the Early Folio plays were written by Marlowe and which they felt were strange to Marlowe.

It is not known who wrote ‘First Part of King Henry the Sixth’ that is claimed to have none of the creation that appears in Marlowe or the Folio but the three parts of ‘Henry VI’ of the Folio have passages either taken from or reworded from Marlowe’s plays.

The poet, Charles Lamb, said of ‘Edward II’, “The reluctant pangs of abdicating royalty in Edward furnished hints which Shakespeare scarce improved in his Richard the Second, and the death scene of Marlowe’s king moves pity and terror beyond any scene, ancient or modern with which I am acquainted”, from ‘Specimens of Dramatick Poets’, 1808.

From his first days at London, Marlowe’s nearest friend was Sir Thomas Walsingham, a first cousin once removed to the Queen’s secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham and Marlowe was living at Sir Thomas’ father’s estate at Scadbury, Chislehurst, south of Greenwich while the plague infested London.

warrant the name is spelled incorrectly and in the second the name is quite different, being ‘Marley’ and not ‘Marlowe. Similar differences in the name were apparent in later documents in relation to his ‘death’ with no reference to a ‘Marlowe’.

Marlowe was to travel from the estate of Sir Thomas’s father, Mr Walsingham, in Kent to the centre of plague infested London each day and return to Scadbury each evening.

Two years before in 1591, Marlowe had shared a writing room with Thomas Kyd and certain papers were found in that room that contained comments considered by certain authorities as ‘heretical’ and on May 18th, 1593, a warrant was issued to one of the messengers of Her Majesties Chamber “to repair to the house of Mr. Thomas Walsingham, in Kent, or to any other place where he shall understand Christofer Marlow to be remaining and by virtue thereof to apprehend and bring him to Court in his company”. Such warrants found no leniency, and knights as well as commoners were all expected to comply as did the president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford on the previous 23rd of April. Also in the records, it is shown that two days after the warrant from the Privy Council:.“Christofer Marley of London, gentleman, being sent for by warrant from their Lordships hath entered his appearance accordingly for his indemnity herein and is commanded to give his daily attendance of their Lordships until he shall be licensed to the contrary”.Inthe

The ‘papers’ found in the room were not in the handwriting of either Kyd or Marlowe as the original ‘papers’ proved to be a published tract that did include ‘vile hereticall Conceiptes denyinge the deity’ in print but were given as an example by the unknown pamphleteer who later in the tract condemned the excerpts in this pamphlet that was for sale throughout the city, but these damning words may have been copied, quoted and presented to the Privy Council on other papers and in the handwriting of someone else.

Marlowe’s life was in danger regardless of whether he was innocent of any charge and the unknown charge is still a mystery. His friend in the Queen’s Court, Sir Walter Ralegh, paid for whatever they charged him with…with his life. No forensic science has proved one way or the other that the man buried at Deptford was Christopher Marlowe. No logical explanation has been given to why he spent that May 30th morning at the Deptford Inn with three other men, ate lunch together, walked and chatted in the gardens and then returned to a upstairs room, still talking, before the knife of one man was taken from him while leaning on a bed and stabbed into him. That man was later identified under more than one name. Another man present, not known to or with any connection to Marlowe, was named as a ‘spy’ in the pay of Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s secretary and a cousin of Marlowe’s long time friend with whom he was residing then at the time of the warrant.

The questions remain unanswered. Marlowe was under warrant by the Privy Council and his life was in danger whether or not he could have proved the charges as unwarranted. Was the man who was stabbed some other person who, under arrangement, was to be a deceased Marlowe under a similar name on the documents ? With the assistance of the Walsinghams, did Marlowe retreat to Scotland where he had been known to say that appreciation for theatre and poetry exceeded London ? Did Marlowe continue to write plays that were taken to the theatre managers, Philip Henslowe and Richard Burbadge ?

There was no indication made by anyone connected to the printing of the First Folio that anyone living in Stratford was the Author. Ben Jonson made no statement other than to identify the brasscut picture on the frontispiece and to name the Folio as being ‘his Booke’. The ‘To the Readers’ of the Second Folio in 1632 did not identify the town of the Author. The only ‘hint’ was in the poem that accompanied the Folio with the words ‘his Stratford moniment’ and the poet was a friend of Ben Jonson. The sparse evidence in private letters found later revealed that very few people were aware of the bust at the church and over the next forty years the few who visited were in Stratford for personal reasons. No one until David Garrick went to Stratford to see the relics at the church and that pilgrimage was for his own purpose of publicity.

There was no necessity to lay them all at the feet of a rarely seen name on eight old Quartos, a name without a face, without a body, without a known friend in a tiny but literary London. Why did no one take the little effort to go to Stratford ? To call upon William of Stratford’s daughter and her physician husband would have put to rest the doubt or the assurance that the Author of the Plays lived in the large house on the main street. No one visited the living man or his relatives that lived long in Stratford.

not accepting that Marlowe continued to write leaves only one alternative solution, the 36 plays were written by more than one person but were rewritten by one dramatist who understood the concepts of Christopher Marlowe’s mighty line and from whatever source these original plays came, he reworded where necessary, corrected errors of logic in Quartos, original manuscript papers or play copies, thereby fulfilling the ‘mark of one man’s hand’ that later scholars could detect in versions of the ‘early plays’, the signs of maturity in later plays that are believed correctly as rewritten versions of earlier known titles as with Thomas Kyd’s ‘Hamlet’.

41 If so, Marlowe continued to mature his craft, undisturbed and free to refer to the Chronicles of Holinshed for the histories that followed. Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’ grew mightier yet without praise or public approval, his faded name relinquishing to the occasional appearance of ‘Shakestaff’’, ‘False spear’ or ‘Beard the Pard’. Did Marlowe in his continuing years give a hidden clue as to his identity behind the Folio Plays and his others, with the beginning letters in their names spelling out his complete name, that the ‘nom de plume’, ‘William Shake speare’, cannot fulfil ? [C]oriolanus [H]amlet [R]ichard II [I]ulius Caesar [S]econd Part Tamburlaine [T]empest [O]thello [P]ericles [H]enry V [E]dward II [R]omeo … [M]acbeth [A]ntony [R]ichard III [L]oues labors [O]thello [W]inter’s tale [E]dward II ? So common were the plays after the Restoration, so dependant on them was each producer and theatre company manager throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries that they never once questioned them as the work of one man. No biographer of the Author, all of whom were so concerned that the Author was the Stratford man along with the praise and honour that they heaped upon the name, no one noticed that not one of the dramatists from the time of Chaucer through the Elizabethan era, and through the entire 17th, 18th and 19th centuries had any dramatist written more than five to ten plays. Ben Jonson was a slight exception with 15 plays but no one had written 36 plays ! In all of the debates as to ‘Who wrote the Plays’, no one explained how it would be possible for one man to write 36 plays, most being longer with more serious subjects than other plays. Accepting the premise that Marlowe continued to write, his previous nine plays would add to the total of 45 plays in one lifetime by one onl y man. Yet, he need not have written all 36 of the FolioBy

The statements in the 1632 Folio over the names of the deceased ‘Heminge and Condell’, included that all previously known ‘copies’ were ‘maimed and deformed’ but that ‘even those are now offered to your view cured and perfect of their limbs as he conceived them’ which can be interpreted as ‘the Quartos that you have known have been altered, rewritten or rephrased, thereby ‘cured’ of their inconsistencies and errors and are now as ‘he’, the single dramatist, has rewritten them and thus have no blot upon these his papers that are here printed in the Folio’. Without these ‘original papers’, the words and phrases within could never be compared with the Folio, the Quartos, or to any written documents or poet’s handwriting. The true ‘authorship’ would be forever only what the Publishers of the Folio wished the public to believe but not to ‘know’ and to finalize that conceit, they included a ‘testimonial’ by those who were implied to be his ‘friends’, the two players who had been employed to act in earlier portrayals of some of the plays that were at last published within one book. From the beginning there was something that had to be concealed. Why else was there not an open declaration of the name of the author on each and every Quarto ? There is no similar question of the work by any other author, poet or dramatist of the entire period from 1585 to 1645. There may be an exception or two for those twenty or more dramatists with lost plays but this concerned the entire 36 plays attributed to a ‘name’ without a history.

forever.Davenant

The first publication witnessed with the name ‘W.S.’ was the Quarto of ‘Loues labors lost’ dated 1598 or five years after Marlowe. It is claimed to have been written in 1594 but this was the first time anyone had seen or heard the name ‘Shakespere’ as the word was spelled there. The full title page read: - A PLEASANT Conceited Comedie CALLED Loues labors lost. As it vvas presented before her Highnes this last Christmas. Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere. Imprinted at London by W.W. for Cutbert Burby, 1598”

The connection between the Plays and Stratford was promoted only by Sir William Davenant who provided stories of his ‘godfather’ at Oxon whom he claimed was the Author of the plays that he presented for the first time after 1660 and the tales that he told were believed by his admirers and passed on to the Poet Laureate to place in print and to be retold and re amplified did not stress that Stratford was the Author’s residence, saying only that the Author stayed at his parents’ Inn at Oxon while travelling to and from London and no one made a trip to Stratford to find any information about the man to place in the ‘Life’ composed by the poet laureate, Nicholas Rowe, in 1709. Why were the ‘original papers’ not kept at a university as Ned Alleyn had donated his artefacts and some of those of the Rose theatre owner Philip Henslowe to Dulwich College ? Was this avoided to prevent anyone in the near or distant future from realizing that the papers contained handwriting that was not the same throughout or that the handwriting was consistent and could be compared to that of another dramatist be it Kit Marlowe or Ben Jonson ?

Not all 36 plays were issued in Quarto form. Only eight Quartos contained an author’s name. The dates of writing are assumed from the assured dates by records of their productions upon the stages. Assuming that all plays were written and produced on stage from 1593 to around 1612 at the latest, it cannot be known that the versions of the plays in stage productions had the same wording as printed in the Folio. It is known from a written description of a Macbeth production of the time, that the play had a great dissimilarity to the Folio version.

The publisher is ‘Cutbert Burby’ which some biographers consider was the proper name for the man but it is obviously an incorrect spelling of Cuthbert Burbadge, the original spelling, brother of Richard and co owner of the players company under whichever patron of the time. Plays were purchased and owned by company owners who had the complete rights to publish plays or not. Playwrights did not publish their plays as Marlowe had Edward Blount as publisher who was the man whose name appears on the First Folio as ‘Printed by Issac Iaggard and Ed Blount’.

’The ‘Tragicall Historie of Hamlet’ -1604- ‘By William Shakespeare’ ‘Mr William Shak speare: His true Chronicle Histories of the life and death of King Lear and his three daughters 1608 ‘Pericles’ 1609 (name in usual lower place) ‘Troilus and Cressida’ 1609 (name in much smaller print) Any Quartos of some of the other 28 Folio Plays did not have an author credited. A few other early printings were made of writings that were not written by ‘W.S.’ although the name was given credit for all within the books ‘Sir John Oldcastle’ 1600 (name on 1st edition only) ‘Jaggard’s Collection of Plays’ -1619- (name as author of all the plays) ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ 1599 ‘by W. Shakespeare’ ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ 1612 ‘by W. Shakespeare’ (expanded edition) ‘ An illustrated ‘Culture History of England’ printed in London in 1967, also has a line that is false. Speaking of the play ‘The Tempest’, “It is the most perfect of his plays, and this may be why his friends Heminge and Condell, although they knew it to be his last, placed it first in the collected edition of the Folio, published in 1623, seven years after his death.” As there are no documents or letters to say that ‘he’ was an actor, there is none to say that ‘Heminge and Condell’ were ‘his friends’. John Heminges spelled his name with a final ‘s’ as everyone of the time knew but again most people since 1660 know only the names from the misspelling in the Folio, and all know only of a ‘death’ being in 1616, from the belief that a man from Stratford was the Author, also supposed only after 1660. In 1623, the entire populace of London was unaware of anyone in Stratford with a name similar but opposed to ‘Shake speare’ or ‘Shakespere’ as it first appeared. There was no reason to consider Stratford for the Author as the playwrights knew that the 36 plays were not of one man as they were aware of earlier versions. All writing of the 21st century is from the viewpoint of the 19th century and not from what people knew or understood in 1616.

‘Excellent history of the Merchant of Venice’ -1600- ‘Written by W. Shakespeare’

The poet laureate, Nicholas Rowe, knew nothing of that era in 1709 Dr Samuel Johnson in 1770 wrote that there was but one theatre building in Elizabeth’s time but he does not mention its name or where it was located He describes the wrong method by which the populace arrived ‘at the theatre’.

The Quarto did not claim that the play was written by ‘W.S. but that it was corrected from an earlier play and augmented or added to by ‘W. Shakespere’ without it giving the first name.

The Civil Wars with the narrow minded followers of Cromwell completely destroyed the knowledge of Elizabethan and Jacobean Theatre for those who came after the 1660 Restoration.

The seven other plays with the name were ’The Tragedie of King Richard II’ 1598 ‘by William Shakespeare’ ’A midsommer nights dreame’ 1600 ‘Written by William Shakespeare’

The encyclopaedias or biographies do not identify by name the theatre in London where Sir William Davenant produced his plays beginning in 1660. What is known about the ‘theatre’ before the Civil wars is through the far sightedness and generosity of his wealth by Edward Alleyn who created the College of God’s Gift at Dulwich and placed there his own theatre collection of papers and Henlowe’s ‘Diary’ of the business at the Rose and the ‘Henslowe Papers’ as he put everything on paper. By these documents it is known now, but was not known to Dr. Johnson in 1770, that a play was bought for five or six pounds while a costume of silk, satin or velvet may cost 20 pounds.

Henslowe and Alleyn built the ‘Fortune’ theatre in Golden Lane, Applegate in 1600 and from that date the Fortune and the Globe were London’s leading theatres. The Fortune burned in 1621, was rebuilt in 1623 and dismantled in 1649, the year when the House of Commons under Cromwell established the Commonwealth that continued the banning of all plays.

It is by Alleyn’s hoarding of papers that it is known what the 18th century did not know. At Dulwich is a rarity, an actor’s individual manuscript with prompt directions placed there by the stage manager, with cues for ‘alarums off’, thunder and music.

George Bernard Shaw as a reader of the plays and a critic of their productions said of the plays: “Now there is not a breath of medieval atmosphere in Shakespear’s histories. His John of Gaunt is like a study of the old age of Drake. His figures are all intensely Protestant, individualist, sceptical, self-centred in everything but their love affairs, and completely personal and selfish even in them. His kings are not statesmen: his cardinals have no religion: a novice can read his plays from one end to the other without learning that the world is finally governed by forces expressing themselves in religions and laws which make epochs rather than by vulgarly ambitious individuals who make rows”. The play producers never bothered to consider this.

The Civil Wars and the Puritan abhorrence of theatre plays that might reveal realities were all repugnant to the governing bodies and they obliterated the realizations that Elizabethans and Jacobeans knew and took for granted leaving the people after the Restoration completely ignorant of what had gone before but also leaving them not interested enough in finding these realities for themselves. Not one poet or dramatist published any tribute or mentioned the name of ‘W.S.’ until long after 1660 and the revival of the plays in London by Sir William Davenant. Not one Elizabethan or Jacobean poet showed any curiosity about ‘W.S.’ as the name was never mentioned in print. Upon the printing of the Folio of 1623, there was no interest in finding the grave of the Man from Stratford.Duringthe years from 1598, when the name first appeared on a Quarto, the name appeared on ‘Venus and Adonis’ and the honied verse caused a brief interest with students and those at the Inns of Court but it created no demand for a second printing. Only a few people would have purchased Quartos and only eight of those had the name on it.

Phillippe Henslowe partnered with his son in law, Edward Alleyne, Marlowe’s actor, at the ‘Rose’ theatre on the South Bank of the River Thames (Thaymz). They also had an unnamed theatre at Newington Butts. The ‘Swan’ theatre ceased being used for plays after 1598 until 1611 when it was again used for four years. The ‘Curtain’ theatre remained at Shoreditch outside the east City Wall when the other original John Burbadge building named ‘the Theatre’ was taken down in 1599 and the materials were sledded across the frozen Thames to Bankside in early 1600 where they were used to build the ‘Globe’ theatre. The Globe burned down in 1613, was rebuilt a few years later and then dismantled in 1644, the year when Cromwell was appointed lieutenant of the army during the First Civil War.

The Elizabethan age is ill treated by authors whether biographers or authors who declare themselves to be historians. ‘A History of Everyday Things in England Volume II 1500 to 1799 First published, London, in 1919’, makes the statement, “Shakespeare started his theatrical life about 1585”. The name was never known publicly or seen in print until the year 1598, and there is no document previous to that to indicate any ‘theatrical life’. The only contention that he was an actor and member of the Burbadge players was on a paper forged in the middle 19th century and exposed as such, yet many biographers continue to claim that he owned shares in the company and later that it was ‘Shakespeare’ s company’. This ‘history’ also says, “Chapman and Marston were companions of Shakespeare” and these two sentences comprise all that is said of him in the book. There is no document or other evidence that any dramatist was a ‘companion of ‘W.S.’.If Kit Marlowe wrote each play, he would have written 45 plays in no longer a time than 25 years. He came to London at the age of 23 and presumably would have died by around 1612 or at the age of 48. He had written his 9 plays from the ages of 22 to 29 or in seven years. This would require him to write the 36 plays in 19 years or two each year that seems to be an incredible accomplishment.Yet,thisisexactly

what biographers of ‘William’ claim that ‘he’ accomplished not from the age of 22 but from the age of 29if he were the Stratford Shaxper having no evidence that ‘he’ had written as little as a letter to a friend in those 29 years and without any document to indicate that he co-authored anything, he is to have picked up where Marlowe ‘left off’ by writing ‘mighty lines’ that were difficult to distinguish from those of the greatest and most lauded dramatist before ‘him’. It is a coincidence that the Man from Stratford whom the biographers from Nicholas Rowe in 1709 to the 21st century have assumed as the Author of the Plays, was born in the same year as Marlowe, 1564. If the year of that man’s birth is not inscribed in the Stratford church, that information, as with other documentation, was not known until one of the members of the Shake speare Society went to Stratford later in the 19th century and to examine the fully available town records. If Marlowe were in Scotland, he would have 19 years in self exile with only his discipline of purpose to write consistently at least a fixed number of lines or pages a week but without other duties or distractions. Biographers of ‘William’, conversely, claim that ‘he’, while writing those 36 plays, was also acting, directing, managing ‘his theatre company’, ‘seeing the fleet off to fight the Armada’, attending social functions, fulfilling duties as marching in parades as a member of the ‘King’s Men’ and being a man-about-the-Royal Court.

The plays on stage did not advertise the authors as only the actors were known to the playgoers by name and by sight as Ned Alleyn was the embodiment of Faustus and Richard Burbadge was the living Hamlet.

No one then was curious as every playwright knew that the rarely seen name of ‘W.S.’ was not a playwright among them. It is known today that many of the playwrights co authored plays but none at that time mentioned the name of ‘W.S.’ as a co author among them. The entire world of ‘W.S.’ was created by biographers from Nicholas Rowe in 1709 to the present each copying the formers’ inventions and adding mythical details for their successors.

The Royal Court was never open to entertaining anyone engaged in the theatre. Any players called to entertain the Queen on those very rare occasions came through the servants’ entrance and went out by that same door as in they went.

This is the Royal opinion of writers of plays who transgress the narrow limits of expressed opinion. This is all that is known of the ‘charge’ against Marlowe. No specific offence is mentioned. Since he was allowed bail, it was not for skewering someone in the street with his sword although his friend had done so to protect Marlowe. The charge was not for a petty offence as brawling or a fistfight. The charge was somewhere between and being tried at Newgate Sessions, it surely concerned something in London and so probably with what was said or portrayed on stage. The penalty of forty pounds was steep and Marlowe had no ‘lands and tenements’. He possibly paid the fine out of money provided by a titled friend and not from the paltry stipend from selling a play. It would be a great advantage to be a dramatist away from England as in Scotland there would be little if any prospect of being arrested for opinions expressed in plays, as Jonson and others as well as Marlowe were, for that reason, sent to fill another room in Newgate Prison. ‘W.S;’ was not so condemned as nothing ever happened to William.After May 30, 1593, Marlowe was ‘gone’ whether by dagger or by design. George Peele was the first to mention his vacancy with a poem published in ‘Honour of the Garter’ dated June 26th 1593. Thomas Nashe followed by publishing a text in which he cries out “Poore deceased Kit Marlowe”. George Chapman wrote a continuation and a finish to Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander’ and dedicated it to Lady Walsingham, published in 1598, the year that a very long poem was published that remains today only because it was an attempt to continue Marlowe’s shepherd song or the name of the poet, Henry Petowe would have been quickly lost to posterity. Within the poem were the words, “Marlo admired, whose honey flowing vaine No English writer can as yet attaine.” Oddly (?), the phrase ‘honey flowing vaine’ was used by sophomores to mock praise the over honeyed verse printed under the title ‘Venus and Adonis’ by ‘W.S.’.

Michael Drayton wrote in his Epistle to Henry Reynold’s ‘Of Poets and Poetry’, the lines: “Next Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs, Had in him those brave translunary things That the first poets had; his raptures were All ayre and fire, which made his verses cleare.” The greatest critic of literature, Ben Jonson, captured Marlowe in one line, Marlowe’s “mighty lines were examples fitter for admiration than for parallel”. If there were a man of those days who could find inconsistencies in the plays attributed to ‘W.S.’, it was Ben Jonson as he quoted many of them.

Out of that Royal Court came the Queen’s proclamation of 1559, “the Queen’s Majesty doth straightly forbid all maner of Interludes to be played eyther openly or privately, except the same be notified before hande and licensed within any citie or towne corporate by the Maior or other chief officers of the same … and if anye shal attempt to the contrary: her majestie giveth all maner of officers that have authoritie to see common peace kept in commaundment to arrest and enprison the parties so offendinge”.

This proclamation was never repealed during the Queen’s reign so under that broad decree, Marlowe was remanded to Newgate prison two years before in October of 1591. In the legal Latin, the Memoranda read in part: “One of the Justices of the Queen, to assign and to become surety for Christopher Marley of London, gentleman, each in the sum of twenty pounds, and the said Christopher Marley, entered into recognisances, under a penalty of forty pounds to be levied on his goods, chattels, lands, and tenements, to appear personally at the next Sessions at Newgate, to answer to all that is alleged against him on the part of our sovereign Lady the Queen, and not to depart without the license of the Court.G.D. Roll 3rd October 31st Elizabeth.”

As was G. B. Shaw, Pepys was a reader of books and plays as well as a playgoer and so his recorded opinions were minor theatre reviews. Yet, these statements were never included by the biographers of the 19th and 20th centuries in their books about ‘William’.

There would possibly have been no Theatre produced in London had it not been for the continued interest and labour of Sir William Davenant who near the end of his turbulent life opened his theatre with his ‘Duke of York Players’ to produce his favourite plays from the Elizabethan era but mainly to produce his own plays.

one man recorded in his diary his daily experiences from January 1st 1660, the year that Davenant opened his theatre. However, that diary was not printed until 1825, well into the Victorian era and only then a ‘small bowdlerized selection from his 54 notebooks’ came to print until 1875-79 when six volumes were published. This meant that the entire 18th century and three quarters of the 19th century could know nothing of the revival of Theatre in England, whether it was popular or what the playgoers thought about the playwrights of the Elizabethan era whose plays they had never seen. The late Victorian Age would still know nothing unless that man had regularly attended the theatre. Fortunately, that man did. He was Samuel Pepys, born in London but in 1633 and so was completely innocent of English Theatre as all of England’s dramatists of the era were gone by 1640 and there was no encouragement for new dramatists to appear under the complete government banishment of Theatre.

Only those who attended the newly opened theatre of Sir William Davenant and saw his acting company, The Duke of York’s Players, had experienced the plays that were denied London since the closing of all theatres during the two civil wars and the Commonwealth under OliverFortunatelyCromwell.

Samuel Pepys witnessed and gave his opinions upon countless plays at the theatres in London from 1660 to 1669 but Sir William Davenant also presented plays written by his ‘godfather’ and whose portrait he presented for his playgoers to gaze upon known as the Chandos.

If there were a man who could have taken old plays and given them his astute criticism and his erudite conception of what the original dramatist intended, that man would have been the playwright of many talents, Ben Jonson, and he could have taken as many as 36 plays and have rewritten them in the mighty line of Marlowe.

Samuel Pepys was the son of a tailor, educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, the University of Christopher Marlowe’s graduation, and he married at the age of 22 and the next year entered the household of his cousin Admiral Edward Montagu, another fortunate of birth. In 1660, he became Clerk of Acts to the Navy Board at 27 and twelve years later was appointed Secretary to the Admiralty. Here was a cultivated young man in 1660 who was an avid buyer of books at the bookseller’s by the church as he had a great interest in science, music and, again fortunately for posterity, the Theatre and he is the only author to express his educated opinion of the plays that were produced in London for the decade of his Diary, during which he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and later served as it’s President. From his position at the ‘Navy’ and from his outside interests, Pepys knew people at every level. Those mentioned in his Diary were merchants, tradesmen, artists and clerks as well as the Dukes, office holders, physicians and bishops. Pepys knew all of the actors and actresses, many personally, and it would seem that he had witnessed most of the plays that were presented at not one, but three theatres during his years, the 9½ recorded in his Diary to May 31st 1669 and in his remaining years until 1703.

“Oct 11, 1660. In St James Park we met with Mr. Salsbury who took Mr. Creed and me to the Cockpitt to see The Moore of Venice, which was well done. Burt acted the Moore; by the same token, a very pretty lady that sat by me cried to see Desdimona smothered.”

“Nov 22, 1660. I took the Coach for my wife and I homewards, and I light at the Maypoole in the Strand and sent my wife home. I to the new playhouse and saw part of The Traytor (a very good Tragedy); where Moone did act the Traytor very well.”

The first Folio play viewed and reported in Pepys’ diary is The Moore.

Mr. Salsbury is a painter; John Creed, F.R.S. is the Deputy-Treasurer of the Fleet’ and Nicholas Burt is an actor in the King’s Company.

“Nov 20, 1660. After dinner Mr Shepley and I to the new Playhouse near Lincolnes Inn fields (which was formerly Gibbons tennis court) where the play Beggars’ bush was newly begun. It was well acted (and here I saw the first time one Moone, who is said to be the best actor in the world, lately come over with the King); and endeed it is the finest playhouse, I believe, that ever was in England.”

“Dec. 31, 1660. At the office all morning. I went out and in Paul’s churchyard I bought the play of Henry the fourth. And so went to the new Theatre and there saw it acted; but my expectation being too great, it did not please me as otherwise I believe it would; and having a book I believe did spoil it a little.”

“Oct 30, 1660. In the afternoon, to ease my mind, I went to the Cockpitt all alone and there saw a fine play called The Tamer tamed, very well acted.”

“Dec 5, 1660. I dined at home and after dinner went to the new Theatre and there I saw The Merry Wifes of Windsor acted The humours of the country gentleman and the French Doctor very well done; but the rest but very poorly, and Sir J. Falstaffe as bad as any.”

“April 20, 1661. So the Cockpitt; and there, by favour of one Mr. Bowman, got in and saw The Humorsome Lieutenant acted before the King, but not very well done. But my pleasure was great to see the manner of it; and so many great beauties, but above all Mrs. Palmer, with whom the King doth discover a great deal of Familiarity.”

Michael Moone is an actor and director of the King’s Company. The Maypole is the tall wood post hung up horizontally on the Strand west of St Clement Danes Church. Pepys then lives close to this near Drury Lane.

The Cockpit is situated about 300 yards from the Thames River, north of the King Street Gate and across from the Whitehall Palace. Until July of 1660, Pepys lived a block south of the Cockpit on Axe Yard. ‘The Humorous Lieutenant’ is by John Fletcher.

“Oct 13, 1660. To my Lord’s in the morning, where I met with Capt. Cuttance. But my Lord not being up, I went to Charing Cross to see Maj Gen Garrison hanged, drawn and quartered which was done there he looking as cheerfully as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down and his head and his heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy.”

“Oct 20, 1660. This afternoon going through London and calling at Crowes the upholster in Saint Bartholomew I saw the limbs of some of our new Traytors set upon Aldergate, which was a sad sight to see, and a bloody week this and the last have been there being ten hanged, drawn and Quarterd. Home and after writing a letter to my Uncle by the post, I went to bed.”

“July 2, 1661. After my singing master had done and took Coach and went to Sir Wm. Davenant’s opera this being the fourth day that it hath begun, and the first that I have seen it. Today was acted the second part of The Siege of Rhodes. The King being come, the Scene opened; which indeed is very fine and magnificent, and well acted, all but the Eunuche who was so much out that he was hissed off the stage.”

“Sept 11, 1661. I to Dr. Williams to talk with him again; and he and I walking though Lincolne’s Inn fields, observed at the Opera a new play, Twelfth night, was acted there, and the King there. So I, against my own mind and resolution could not forbear to go in which did make the play seem a burthen to me, and I took no pleasure at all in it.”

“Dec 1, 1662. I to the Cockpitt, with much crouding and waiting, where I saw The Valiant Cidd acted, a play I have read with great delight; but is a most dull thing acted (which I never understood before), there being no pleasure in it, though done by Baterton and my Ianthe and another fine wench that is come in the room of Roxalana.”

The maid upstages the Dane, if this be or not be ‘that’ Dane. A version listed as ‘adapted by Davenant’ was played in 1661.

“Aug 24, 1661. To the Opera and there saw Hamlet Prince of Denmark, done with Scenes very well. But above all, Batterton did the Prince’s part beyond imagination.”

“Nor did the King or Queene once smile all the whole play, nor any of the company seem to take any pleasure but what was in the greatness and gallantry of the company.”

It is not known to which extent Davenant ‘adapted’ this play but it receives a better review from Pepys who admires Betterton’s performance of the Dane in both versions.

The time of Dr Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary is still far off and so the spelling of Pepys’ words reflects the pronunciation and the still variations of spelling in 1661.

“Sept 29, 1662. I sent for some dinner and there dined (Mrs Margt Pen being by, to whom I had spoke to go along with us to a play this afternoon) and then to the King’s Theatre, where we saw Midsummers nights dreame, which I have never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life. I saw, I confess some good dancing and some handsome women, which was all my pleasure.”

“May 8, 1663. Thence to the new playhouse, the second day of its being opened. The play was The Humorous Lieutenant, a play that hath little good in it.”

“May 28, 1663. To the Dukes house and there saw Hamlett done, giving us fresh reason never to think enough of Baterton. Who should we see come upon the Stage but Gosnell, my wife’s maid, but neither spoke, danced nor sung; which I was sorry for. But she becomes the stage very well.”

“Jan 6, 1663. Twelfth day. After dinner to the Dukes house and there saw Twelfth night acted well, though it be but a silly play and not relating at all to the name or day.”

The play is a translation of Pierre Corneille’s ‘The Cid’.

Dr. Williams is a physician. “May 20, 1662. My wife and I by coach to the Opera and there saw the second part of Seige of Rhodes but it is not so well done as when Roxalana was there who, it is said, is now owned by my Lord of Oxford.”

‘Roxalana’ is Hester Davenport, actress with the Duke’s Company who was known by her role in Davenant’s Siege of Rhodes’

“January 21, 1664. Up and after sending my wife to my Aunt Wight’s to get a place to see Turner hanged, I to the office where we sat all morning. And at noon, going to the Change and seeing people flock in that, I enquired and found that Turner was not yet hanged and so I went among them, to Leadenhall street at the end of Lyme street, near where the robbery was done, and to St Mary Axe where he lived, and there I got for a shilling to stand upon the wheel of a Cart. It was believed there was at least 12 to 14000 people in the street.”

“Dec 24, 1663. And at home find my wife making mince pies; and by and by comes in Capt Ferrers to see us and among other talk, tells us of the goodness of the new play of Henry the 8th.”Capt Robert Ferrer is the Master of the Horse of Sandwich. ‘Henry VIII’ is ‘new’ to Pepys.

‘The Indian Queen’ is a play co written by John Dryden and his father in law, Sir Robert Howard in 1663. The general opinion is that the pupil, Dryden, exceeds his master, at least when writing with his wife’s father. ‘Henry the 8th’ was also ‘adapted by Davenant’.

Ben Jonson’s play is considered better than the comedies of ‘W. S.’.

“Jan 1, 1664. But my wife and I rise from table pretending business, and went to the Dukes house, the first play I have been at these six months, according to my last vowe, and here saw the so much cried up play of Henry the 8th which, though I went with resolution to like it, is so simple a thing made up of a great many patches, that, besides the shows and processions in it, there is nothing in the world good or well done.”

Two blocks west of this corner of Leadenhall and Lyme St Mary’s Axe where Cornhill Street meets Poultry Street is the corner of the Stocks Market where both the Market for livestock and the stocks for miscreants stood in Elizabethan times and the phrase ‘livestock’s market’ became the name ‘The Stockmarket’. At this corner stood those who would lend money at ‘ten in a hundred’ and met those who would borrow. William Shaxper of Stratford is said to have lived at St Marys Close north of this corner where he would stand as a lender of monies.

“Aug 2, 1664. To the King’s playhouse and there saw Bartholomew fayre, which doth still please me and is, as it is acted, the best comedy in the world I believe.”

“Jan 24, 1664. My wife and I took coach and to Covent garden to buy a mask at the French house, Madam Charett’s, for my wife in the way observing the street full of coaches at the new play, The Indian Queene; which for show, they say, exceeds Henry the 8th ”

The Rival Ladies is a play by John Dryden living at the time. Sir William Penn is the Navy Commissioner from 1660 to 1669, Pepys’ superior. The unfortunate Walter Clun, an actor with the King’s Company, is mentioned several times further in Pepys’ Diary always reminiscent of his good acting before 1664.

“Aug 4, 1664. At noon dined with Sir W. Pen, a piece of beef only, and I counterfeited a friendship and mirth which I cannot have with him. Yet out with him by his coach, and he did carry me to a play and pay for me at the King’s house, which is The Rivall Ladys, a very innocent and most pretty witty play. I was much pleased with it and it being given me. Here we hear that Clun, one of their best actors, was the last night, going out of towne (after he had acted The Alchymist, wherein was one of this best parts that he acts) to his country house, was set upon and murdered, one of the rogues taken, an Irish fellow It seems, most cruelly butchered and bound…the house will have a great miss of him.”

is Roger Boyle, 1st Earl of Orrery, a soldier, politician and dramatist writing ‘The Black Prince’ and ‘The General’ as well of ‘Henry the 5th’. Pepys does not mention seeing any other play by the name, ‘Henry V’.

“Sept 10, 1664. Then my wife and I and Mercer to the Dukes house and there saw The Rivals, which is no excellent play, but good action in it especially Gosnell comes and sings and dances finely but for all that, fell out of the Key, so that the Musique could not play to her afterwards and so did Harris also go out of the tune to agree with her.”

“Dec 2, 1664. After dinner, with my wife and Mercer to the Dukes house and there saw The Rivalls, which I had seen before. But The play not good, nor anything but the good actings of Baterton and his wife and Harris.”

“Aug 15, 1665. Up by 4 a clock and walked to Greenwich where something put my last night’s dream into my head, which I think is the best that ever was dreamed which was, that I had my Lady Castlemayne in my armes and was admitted to use all the dalliance I desired with her and then dreamed that this could not be awake but that it was only a dream. But that since it was a dream and that I took so much real pleasure in it, what a happy thing it would be if when we are in our graves (as Shakespeere resembles it), we could dream, and dream but such dreams as this that then we should not need to be so fearful of death as we are this plague time.”

“Dec 28, 1666. To the Duke’s house, and there saw Macbeth most excellently acted, and a most excellent play for variety.”

“Aug 13, 1664. And to a new play at the Dukes house, of Henery the 5th a most noble play writ by my Lord Orery, wherein Baterton, Harris, and Ianthes parts are most incomparably wrote and done and the whole play the most full of heighth and raptures of wit and sense that ever I‘Lordheard.”Orery’

“Nov 4, 1664. Change and thence home to dinner; and so with my wife to the Duke’s house to a play, Macbeth; a pretty good play, but admirably acted.”

“Oct 1, 1665. Spent most of the morning reading of The Seige of Rhodes, which is certainly (the more I read it the more I think so) the best poem that ever was wrote.”

“Aug 17, 1664. Thence to Mrs. Pierces and with her and my wife to see Mrs. Clarke where with him and her very merry, discoursing of the late play of Henery the 5th which they conclude the best that ever was made.”

Barbara Palmer is the Countess of Castlemaine, the King’s mistress, and Pepys favourite court beauty. She is the ancestress of Dukes of Grafton.

“Dec 18, 1664. So home to dinner and then to my chamber to read Ben Johnson’s Cateline, a very excellent piece.”

“Jan 2, 1667. Alone to the King’s House and there saw The Custome of the Country, the second time of its being acted, wherein Knipp does the Widow well but of all the plays that ever I did see, the worst, having neither plot, language, nor anything in the earth that is acceptable, Only Knipp sings a little song admirably. But fully the worst play that ever I saw or I believe shall see. So away home, much displeased for the loss of so much time.”

Elizabeth Mercer is the companion of Pepys’ wife, Elizabeth St Michel. Winifred Gosnell was also a companion to Pepys’ wife before becoming an actress and a member of the ‘Duke’s Company’ of Davenant as was the actor, Henry Harris. ‘The Rivals’ is not the future play of Sheridan but an ‘adaptation’ or reworking by Davenant of the play, ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’ by John Fletcher that later is falsely co attributed to a ‘William Shake speare’.

“Apr 19, 1667. So to the playhouse where not much company come, which I impute to the heat of the weather, it being very hot. Here we saw Macbeth, which though I have seen it often, yet is it one of the best plays for a stage, and variety of dancing and music, that I ever saw.”

52 Elizabeth Knepp is an actress with the King’s Company. Pepys in his ‘review’ of Fletcher’s ‘The Custom of the Country’ writes similarly to G. Bernard Shaw but briefly.

“Mar 2, 1667. After dinner with my wife to the King’s house, to see The Mayden Queene, a new play of Dryden’s mightily commended for the regularity of it and the strain of wit; and the truth is, there is a comical part done by Nell, which is Florimell, that I never can hope ever to see the like done again by man or woman. The King and Duke of York was at the play; but so great performance of a comical part was never I believe, in the world before as Nell doth this, both as a mad girle and then, most and best of all when she comes in like a young gallant; and hath the motions and carriage of a spark the most that ever I saw an y man have. It made me, I confess, admire“Marher.”25,

1667. To the King’s playhouse, Sir W. Penn and I in the pit’ and here saw The Mayden Queene again’ which endeed, the more I see the more I like; and is an excellent play, and so done by Nell her merry part, as cannot be better done in Nature.”

Pepys prefers ‘The Musical’ version of the King of Cawdor but does not identify the scenes where the dancing is featured, whether at the Banquet for Banquo where all dancers head for the empty chair when the ‘hot boys’ stop playing ‘Shake not your gory locks at me’ or the ‘Ladies’ Trio Dance around the Cauldron to the tune of ‘Mingle, mingle, mingle that you mingle may’.

“May 16, 1667.After dinner, my wife and I to the Duke’s playhouse, where we saw the new play acted. The Feign Innocence of Sir Martin Marr all, a play made by my Lord Duke of Newcastle, but as everybody says corrected by Dryden. It is the most entire piece of Mirth, a complete Farce from one end to the other, that certainly was ever writ. I never laughed so in all my life, I laughed till by head [ached] all the evening and night with my laughing, and at very good wit therein, not fooling.”

“May 17, 1667. My Wife and I and Sir W. Penn to the King’s playhouse, where the house extraordinary full and there was the King and Duke of York to see the new play, Queen Elizabeths Troubles, and the History of Eighty Eight. I confess I have sucked in so much of the sad story of Queen Elizabeth from by cradle, that I was ready to weep for her sometimes. But the play is the most ridiculous that sure ever came upon stage, but the play is merely a puppet play acted by living puppets.”

Pepys saw the Fletcher’s ‘Lieutenant’ in 1661 and 1662 but this viewing is momentous as the actress, Elizabeth Knepp, introduces them to Nelly.

“Jan 7, 1667. And thence to the Duke’s house and saw Macbeth; which though I saw it lately, yet appears a most excellent play in all respects, but especially in divertisement, though it be a deep tragedy; which is a strange perfection in a tragedy, it being most proper here and suitable.”“Jan 23, 1667. Thence to the King’s House and there saw The Humerous Lieutenant a silly play, I think only the spirit it, that grows very Tall and then sinks again to nothing, having two heads treading upon one, and then Knipps singing, did please us. Here in a box above, we spied Mrs Pierce; and going out she called us, and so we stayed for them and Knipp took us all in and brought to us Nelly, a most pretty woman, who acted the great part, Coelia, today very fine, and did it pretty well; I kissed her and so did my wife, and a might pretty soul she is.”

“Nov 7, 1667. Up, and at the office hard all the morning; and at noon resolve with Sir W. Penn to go see The Tempest, an old play of Shakespeares, acted here the first day. And forced to sit in the side Balcone over against the Musique-room at the Dukes House close by my Lady Dorsett and a great many great ones: the house mighty full, the King and Court there, and the most innocent play that ever I saw, and a curious piece of Musique in an Echo of half sentences, the Echo repeating the former half while the man goes on to the latter, which is mighty pretty. The play no great wit; but yet good, above ordinary plays.”

“July 13, 1667. Mr Pierce dined with us’ who tells us what troubles me, that my Lord Buckhurst hath got Nell away from the King’s House, lies with her, and gives her 100L a year, so as she hath sent her parts to the House and will act no more.”

This is one of only two occasions where Pepys mentions the name, ‘Shakespeare’ in the almost 10 years of the Diary. .

Sir Charles Sedley is a dramatist who wrote ‘The Mulberry Garden or The Wandring ladys’ in the year before. Charles Sackville Buckhurst is co translator of Corneille’s ‘Pompee’ in 1664 “Sept 4, 1667. To the Duke of York’s playhouse and there see Mustapha which the more I see, the more I like’; and is a most admirable poem and bravely acted; only, both Batterton and Harris could not contain from laughing in the midst of a most serious part, from the ridiculous mistake of one of the men upon the stage which I did not like.”

“Dec 28, 1667. With my wife and girl to The King’s House and there saw The Mad Couple, which is but an ordinary play; but only, Nells and Hearts mad parts are most excellently done, but especially hers; which makes it a miracle to me to think how ill she doth any serious part, as the other day, just like a fool or changeling, and in a mad part, doth beyond all imitation almost.”“Jan 11, 1668. To the King’s House, there to see The Wildgoose chase which I never saw but have long longed to see, it being a famous play, but as it was yesterday, I do find that where I expect most I find least satisfaction, for in this play I met with nothing extraordinary at all, but very dull inventions and designs.”

The ‘King’s Playhouse’ is situated on a short street between Bow Street on the west and Drury Lane on the east. A block south on Drury Lane another short street east past the Clare Market leads to Davenant’s ‘The Duke’s Playhouse’ by Lincoln’s Inn Fields a block south of Holborn Street and Gray’s Inn.

‘Mustapha’ is another play by the Duke of Orrery.

“July 14, 1667. We took coach again and to the Towne to the King’s Head. Here we called for drink and bespoke dinner. And hear that my Lord Buckhurst and Nelly is lodged at the next house, and Sir Ch Sidley with them and kept a merry house. Poor girl, I pity her, but more the loss of her at the King’s House.”

‘The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth’ is a play by Thomas Heywood as is ‘Love’s Mistress’ that Pepys saw on May 15, 1665 of which he wrote: ‘Good variety in it but no or little fancy in it”. Heywood wrote his plays between 1602 and 1635.

The biographers of William stress that Thomas Betterton, the leading actor for the Duke of York Players under Sir William Davenant was the finest actor of his time. Pepys records his seeing at least 14 performances by Betterton and his wife, Mary, whom Pepys refers to as Ianthe from her best role. Pepys mentions at least fourteen other actors and actresses in the Diary.

Peg Hughes is an actress in the King’s Company. John Banister is a court musician from 1660 “Dec67.

“May 7, 1668. I the Duke of York’s House and there saw The Man’s the Maister, which proves upon my seeing it again, a very good play. Here I did kiss the pretty woman newly come, called Pegg, that was Sir Ch. Sidley’s mistress - a might pretty woman, and seems, but is not, modest. Thither comes Bannester with a song of hers that he hath set in Sir Ch Sidly’s play for her.”

On the 31st of May following, Pepys gave up writing his Diary “May 31, 1669. And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my journal, I being not able to do it any longer, having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time that I take a pen in my hand; and therefore, whatever comes of it I mustPepysforbear.”never named any of the authors of the dozens of plays that he saw and noted in his Diary except those authors who were living and that he would have known if only slightly, Pepys being a younger man of 27 in 1660 with a very honoured position in the Navy, walking around London much of the week and travelling by coach at night with his wife to visit well known people and to attend the theatres where much of the populace gathers with conversations among friends and acquaintances afterward consisting of a large section of the populace of London.

Nell is the incomparable comedy actress, Nell Gwyn, who is an ancestress of Dukes of St Albans and is King Charles’ mistress from 1669. The theatres were not the only scenes of spectacle to draw London crowds.

This was likely so in Elizabethan and Jacobean times in a London with a much smaller population but with far many more dramatists and poets than after the Restoration. So people who were writing diaries or printed tracts or books would not be mentioning in them people who they did not know or who were not living but rather including in those tracts and books all references to those whom they did know personally or by reputation in London. There would be no need for them to refer to ‘W. Shake speare’, since no one knew anyone of that name nor would there be any curiosity of whom the name implied as it was but a name on a rare Quarto or a poem for sale by Pawl’s churchyard.

“April 17, 1669. At noon home to dinner, and there find Mr. Pierce the surgeon, and he dined with us; and there hearing that The Alchymist was acted, we did go and took him with us, at the King’s House; and is still a good play, it having not been acted for two or three years before, but I do miss Clun for the Doctor but more, my eyes will not let me enjoy the pleasure I used to have in a play.”

19, 1668. My wife and I by hackney to the King’s playhouse and there, the pit being full, sat in a box above and saw Catelin’s Conspiracy yesterday being the first day a play of much good sense and words to read, but that doth appear the worst upon the stage, I mean the least divertising, that ever I saw any, though most fine in clothes and a fine Scene of the Senate and of a fight, that I ever saw in my life but the play is only to be read and so home, my wife to read to me out of The Siege of Rhodes.”

“Jan 7, 1669. My wife and I to the King’s playhouse and there saw The Island princesse, for first time I ever saw it and it is a pretty good play. We sat in an upper box, and that jade Nell came and sat in the next box, a bold merry slut, who lay upon laughing there upon people and with a comrade of hers of the Duke’s House that came in to see the play.”

This is the play of Davenant that they had seen on stage.

If Sir William Davenant had any idea that the true Author of the Plays lived or had lived at Stratford, he had more to gain than any other of the time by going to Stratford and meeting the relatives of his ‘god father’. Davenant did not go and he had more to risk if, in going, he would discover that the Man in Stratford had no talent for writing and could only sign his name in a scrawl. Either that or he knew from the beginning that there was no Author to be found.

Elizabethans Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher together have 24 of their plays produced in the same ten years while living dramatists no longer known have 14 plays produced.

The biographers of ‘William’ never mention Betterton’s wife, Mary, the actress referred to as ‘Ianthe’, while they imply that Betterton visited the ‘neighbours’ in Stratford and supplied Nicholas Rowe with biographical information on the Man who lived at Stratford for his ‘Life’ of the Author to include in his new edition of the Plays in 1709. The biographers do not mention the many other plays produced by Davenant giving the narrow impression that the plays of the great Author were the main fare for those many years.

Pepys never mentions having seen the portrait of the great Author that the biographers claim was displayed by Davenant in claiming that it was of his god father, the man who wrote some plays that he produced. Pepys mentions only the long list of actors and actresses he saw at all theatres.

55 Pepys never makes note of whether Davenant has altered the original script for those plays that are understood today to have been ‘adapted’ by him. At times he describes his buying books of some of these plays and an occasion when he is attempting to memorize “to bee or not to bee” that indicates his preference of plays with soliloquies as he admires Thomas Betterton’s portrayals of Hamlet and Macbeth as throughout the years from these years to the present, those Folio plays that have impressive soliloquies have proved to be the most accepted by actors and their audiences.Pepysnever mentions Sir William Davenant which is odd since he is the manager and producer of the plays at his ‘Duke of York Playhouse’ and he is also the poet laureate of England. He died in 1667 with Betterton assuming the management of the theatre company.

Only ten of the 36 plays of the Folio are listed in the Diary as having been produced in those initial ten years and absent from them is ‘King Lear’, ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘Henry V’, ‘Richard III’ and ‘The Merchant of Venice’ that along with ‘Hamlet’, ‘Othello’ and ‘Macbeth’ comprise the eight most chosen plays from the Folio for portrayal by the 20th century’s most forceful actor producers, John Barrymore, Lawrence Oliver and Orson Welles.

Other than ‘lodging in Shoreditch’ that is obviously taken from the reminder note that John Aubrey did not include in his writings that were not published until late in the 19th century, this is a description only of what any man would have while living alone anywhere, yet there are no manuscripts listed here.

THE LEGEND CONTINUES Robert J. Meyer

“Shakespeare possessed a powerful body and a strong voice, his stamina was exceptional, his quick committal to memory of new parts prodigious. He began acting five or six years before he became known as a playwright, and he continued up to performances of ‘The Tempest’ written about 1611, though he acted less and less after 1600. He thus trod the boards for 25 years, if not more. This is a feat of sustained professional survival that is extraordinary.”

“Lodging in a single room in a Shoreditch suburban house”, “Shakespeare slept in a simple bedchamber, with as few trappings as there would be today on the starkest of his stage sets, a bed, a chest, a desk, a window heavy with shutters, a few books, a chamber pot. He would have gone to bed naked, thrown aside his clothes on the back of a chair but kept a nightgown or dressing gown at hand.”

One member of the newly formed 19th century Shakespeare Society of London finally went to Stratford and he found all that is known of William of Stratford in the town records. Another member, whom all other members made their leader, was given the permission to examine the Lord Ellesmere collection in which he inserted his forged mentions of ‘missing’ information about the Author and these published frauds went unchallenged by the ‘scholars and experts’ for over 20 years. Once they were revealed as expertly crafted fabrications, the contents of these forgeries continued to be published in 20th century ‘biographies of ‘William as true information without reference to their source. A third member of the Society thought that the first member’s rooting through genuine Stratford files was a waste of time as all that he revealed were uninteresting and mundane trivia that were no different that those of other villagers. He, in contrast, stayed in London and wrote about the home life of the Great Author without the necessity of relying on any source but his own poetic and fanciful imagination. He wrote books that described the young ‘Willy’ reading to his brothers and sister by the fireside in their comfortable home, from books that no Stratford resident possessed and that the family would never be able to afford. That facility to dream about the Dramatist is active still.

In the 1990s, the New York Times published an “edited excerpt” adapted from “William Shakespeare: A Popular Life” by Garry O’Connor. Drawing on a variety of sources, O’Conner attempts to reconstruct the playwright’s life and career. After explaining how serious and difficult the work of the actor was, O’Connor describes how this one ‘actor’ lived.

The first time that the name ‘Shake speare’ was known is the autumn of 1593. William of Stratford died in 1616, twenty three years after the name was first known. Mr. O’Connor should have known that it would be impossible for ‘Shake-speare to have ‘acted for 25 years’ and it would be impossible for him to have acted any number of years before his name appeared in print. Perhaps, O’Connor is not referring to the Man from Stratford. Then who is he mentioning?

The proof and confessions that these claims were deliberate forgeries have not lessened their repetition. The obvious invention of the older Legends of his Stratford life and his entering the London theatre have not ended the belief that William of Stratford was the Great Author although enough is known of this man and his ‘will and testament’ and that no scrap of his writing as little as a letter was found in his daughter’s family that prized all writings and books.

The forgeries of the 19th century upon which all of the claims that William was an actor and a member and shareholder of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were exposed long before 1900, and these claims therefore should not have continued as they did throughout the 20th century.

Professor Hildegard Hammerschmidt Hummel, of Mainz University, Germany writes a letter to the Daily Telegraph of Manchester that is published on October 2, 1999 and says, “SIR - A. L. Rowse was right in identifying the Earl of Southampton as Shakespeare’s young friend and patron in the sonnets (article, Sept 21) but wrong in saying that the Dark Lady was Emilia Lanier Bassano. Early in 1997 I came to realise that Marcus Gheeraert’s The Persian Lady, which was painted between 1590 and 1600, contains decisive evidence about the Dark Lady. In the lower righthand corner there is an hitherto unidentified sonnet which complains that ‘others’ have taken away the fruit of the author’s love. With the help of experts in linguistics, medicine, botany, and criminology, I have identified its author as Shakespeare and the elegant exceinte stranger as Elizabeth Vernon, who married Southampton in late August 1598. A senior gynaecologist states that, in his opinion, the pregnant woman in the painting is about eight to 12 weeks before childbirth. Vernon’s daughter Penelope was born on Nov. 8, 1588 about 10 weeks later….In 1615, Penelope married Lord Spencer. A German CID scientist has confirmed from examining Van Dyck’s portrait of her [Penelope] that there is striking resemblance to Shakespeare but none whatsoever to Southampton.”

Also in this article of the New York Times is a reproduction of a “Portrait attributed to Frans Hals was thought to be of W.S.”

William of Stratford was 42 in 1606 and according to author Garry O’Connor this last minute fill in ‘possessed a powerful body and a strong voice’. “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand !!” Loud bursts of boisterous laughter off.

There is a ‘striking resemblance to’ a ‘name’ of which there is no portrait other than the one that William Davenant found and chose to represent his ‘god father’ or true father after 1660. Many other old and newer portraits of other persons by un-credited artists have been brought forward over the years, none looking any more similar than to countless other 17th century portraits of men including the one by Frans Hals ‘thought to be’ of the Author. None of these are even vaguely similar to the image of William of Stratford supposedly taken from a death mask and still viewable at the church. More ‘experts’, this time in ‘linguistics, medicine, botany and criminology’, have identified as the author of a sonnet upon a painting by Gheeraert as composed by the Great Author but all neglect to say if the author painted it himself. Author A. L. Rowse insists that Southampton was a friend and patron of William but there is no evidence that the Earl gave his patronage to any of the several poets that dedicated their poems to him for that purpose, nor is there any evidence that Southampton knew who, if anyone, bore that name. The Earl never made any comment upon any sonnets or poets.

Another chapter of the Legend appeared in a Toronto newspaper on May 18, 2000 when an article states: “Like most men and women of the theatre [Kelsey] Grammar acknowledges the legend and superstition that have historically been associated with Macbeth. At the first performance of the play 1606, a young Hal Berridge who played Lady Macbeth collapses from a fever and later died. Legend had it that Shakespeare himself had to fill in.”

Since there is no document or letter known to have stated anything about a ‘William Shake speare, where does O’Connor find this information about ‘W.S.’ having a ‘powerful body and strong voice’? Taking these statements literally, this person began acting five years before his name is printed on a play, this would place his acting days at least as early as 1582 and his ‘horse handling’ came before being ‘taken into the theatre’ or the spring of 1581 upon leaving in Stratford a wife and three children when he was at the age of sixteen. This is imagined by biographers to bring him to London at the earliest possible age and to have him leave by 1609 when other biographers have him ‘retiring to Stratford’ as the appearance of published plays in Quarto ceased about that year.

The unending search for the ‘Identity of William’ began in earnest in the 1780s when James Wilmot, a retired clergyman, was the first to search the town of Stratford looking for private libraries that might contain original manuscripts or information on the identity or mere possessions of the Great Playwright but having scoured the entire surrounding area he found nothing. That search continues into the 21st century not in Stratford but among the prominent names of Elizabethan times.

The most prominent name is still that of Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, 1550 1604. His father in law was Lord Burlegh, [Burleigh] the Lord Chamberlain to Elizabeth This man is the reason for the excuse that courtiers could not associate themselves with the theatre as that had a low reputation, yet plays were presented continually before Elizabeth to her delight. Edward de Vere and some other courtiers wrote poetry. His devotees have found that his Geneva bible in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. contains underlined words and phrases that, ‘unbelievably’, appear in some of the Plays. From Exodus 3:14, “God said unto Moses, I am that I am” in bold letters also appears in a letter that De Vere wrote to his father and as strange as that may be, the same five word sentence also appears in Sonnet 121, “No. I am that I am; and they that level At my abuses, reckon up their own. All men are bad and in their badness reign.” It is not decided whether this means that De Vere wrote the plays or did Moses. Also highlighted in the De Vere bible are the words ‘weaver’s beam’ in II Samuel 21:19, “where Elhanan, slew the brother of Goliath the Gittite, the staff of whose spear was like a weaver’s beam” and this phrase appears again by strange coincidence in ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ when Falstaff in Act 5, Scene 1 says, not as mentioned in the Time magazine of February 15, 1999, “a Falstaff speech refers to a ‘weaver’s beam’”, but “Master Brook, I fear not Goliath with a weaver’s beam, because I know also life is a shuttle.” Since De Vere underlined this in his bible, De Vere must have known that the Author of Merry Wives had made a gross error in saying ‘Goliath with a weaver’s beam’ when the spear that was ‘like a weavers beam’ belonged not to Goliath but to his brother. This should indicate, if nothing else, that De Vere was not the author of such a faux pas. Yet the De Vere delusion continues to gather converts.

To bolster the De Vere authorship without public knowledge, another book is written in 1997, ‘Alias Shakespeare’, by Joseph Sobran who comes up with another reason for De Vere’s secrecy. He claims that ‘The Sonnets’ suggested that Southampton, who is never named, should marry De Vere’s daughter who also is never named, but that “they evolved into a dense homoeroticism”.

There is no evidence that Southampton was aware of The Sonnets to have searched out these hidden innuendoes nor that anyone at the time read into the Sonnets what later ‘scholars’ now claim. If this argument were genuine, there was nothing to keep De Vere from writing plays under his own name and to leave the Sonnets under that other name.

That William of Stratford did not go to a university as other playwrights had gained degrees, Jonathan Bate in his ’The Genius of Shakespeare’ claims that grammar schools, the free schools, offered education in Latin including oratory and letter writing and the students had to embellish on literary works. This is the opposite to known statements by young men who had learned Latin but who confess that in the summer they forgot most of what they had learned and there is no evidence that William Shaxper of Stratford completed his full term at free school when he would be sixteen. Again this allegation would place ‘Shake spear’ alone as a master poet who did not have a formal education beyond free school. The greatest weakness in the De Vere contention is that he died in 1604 before 14 of the plays were either performed or printed and this would place the writing of all the plays during a shorter length of time and lengthens the time it took to publish the First Folio to 19 years. De Vere did write poetry but none of it showed any particular talent.

“In 1587, there was pub brawl among the Queen’s Men when visiting Warwickshire in which one player died. The stage struck boy filled the vacancy and returned to London with the leading troupe of the day. He started out as a horse minder outside the theatre, gradually working his way inside as a prompter, call boy and bit part player by 1592, when he is jealously denounced as an ‘upstart crow’ (or plagiarist) by a jealous rival on his deathbed, Robert Greene. He had already written seven plays, some of them, like the Henry VI trilogy, his earliest box office hits. At the height of his career, as a playwright, actor and shareholder in the theatre, Shakespeare was earning 200 pounds a year (or some 100,000 pounds, $239,000 Canadian at today’s values).”

How many Elizabethan poets were also born under Aries and thus were ‘Master Williams’ ?

The only known portrait of De Vere was painted by an unknown artist. The speaker at the De Vere ancestral seat, Hedingham Castle, near Halstead, Essex was the then well known writer Gabriel Harvey who praised De Vere in the presence of Queen Elizabeth and her court in 1598. Harvey had urged De Vere to spend his time on military matters saying, not as Blacklock misquotes him but “Thine eyes flash fire, they countenance shakes a spear; who would not swear that Achilles had come to life again”. Edward de Vere completely depleted his fortune at an early age and for some reason Elizabeth granted him a 1000 pound a year annuity. De Vere employed as his secretary for many years the poet John Lyly who wrote ‘Euphues’. If De Vere wrote plays, John Lyly would have known about it and he leaves no evidence of it.

An article in the International Express, August 17, 1999, by Mark Blacklock reports on the three year archival research by historian Charles Bird who believes that the Author is “Edward de Vere the 14th Earl of Oxford” and he offers once again the old excuse of “writing plays and poetry may have been viewed with distaste and he adopted a pseudonym to free him from critical comments from other aristocrats” although many nobles wrote poetry including Walter Ralegh.

William was not a ‘boy’ in 1587 but a 23- year-old husband and a father of three children. That he substituted for a dead player is pure invention. The ‘horse minder’ portion is a complete fabrication of an unknown author but repeated by biographers and elaborated upon by Dr Samuel Johnson without his verifying the legitimacy or the sense of such a tale. No early biographer set forth that he was a ‘call boy’ or ‘prompter’ and it is only speculation that they had ‘call boys’ around 1600.

Among Bird’s claims is that this Earl of Oxford was known by his friends as ‘Master William’ as he was born under the sign of Aries the Ram and lame sheep were known locally as ‘Master Williams’. If that reason is not sufficient, he also says that he may have taken the surname after being congratulated by a speaker at his Essex Castle who praised De Vere with ‘Your eyes flash fire. Th y countenance shake a speare’, if that makes any grammatical or any other type of sense. Blacklock says that “DeVere does not look even remotely like Shakespeare, but Mr Bird is convinced that the documentary evidence is compelling”. Again Blacklock is another who ‘knows’ how ‘he’ looked with his portrait never having been painted. Blacklock says that De Vere was the 14th Earl of Oxford whereas he was the 17th Earl.

Anthony Holden, an author in London, England, writing in The Globe and Mail of Toronto, January 11, 2000, brings in another possible contender as the writer of the Plays, in addition to De Vere, Earl of Oxford and Sir Francis Bacon, adding the Earl of Arundel who is not mentioned by other writers. He is convinced that ‘Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare’.

A University of California professor says of De Vere, “The Earl of Oxford was perhaps the most egotistical and self serving person of his day in England. It would have been out of character for him to write the plays and then keep authorship a secret. Many Elizabethan noblemen wrote and published”.

Holden does not identify the ‘new evidence’ but there seems to be no reason to suppose that this one person in Stratford would be a fugitive from the ‘secret service’ of the Queen to the exclusion of all his brothers and his father and anyone else in the town or in other towns. This is supposed to be a young lad of no more that 12 or 13 when he left ‘school’ as there is no evidence that he completed free school. Even if William left at 16, he could not have gone out of Stratford as he is documented as living there while marr ying Anne who gave birth to three children, the youngest, Hamnet, being born in 1585 when William was 21 and since the supposition is that William was in London in 1591 there are no unaccounted for or ‘lost’ years between ‘school in his mid teens’ and his ‘arrival in London’ that total ‘almost a decade’. Not even the legends of his ‘coming to London’ suggest that William was a ‘would-be actor/writer’ as there was nothing holding him from writing for his own amazement but there are no poems, essays, broadsides or a letter from William of Stratford. There is no new evidence that would conflict with the known documents that place William at Stratford as a married man with three children living on Henley Street at least until 1585. There are all of the documents that record his buying of land and the personal dealings with other residents in town and one of buying and mortgaging the ‘Gate house at Blackfriars’ in London.

Anthony Holden also asks an oft asked question, “What happened to our hero between school and his arrival in London almost a decade later as would be actor/writer ? New evidence strongly suggests that he escaped to the county of Lancaster, an illegal Roman Catholic on the run from Elizabethan I’s secret service, and spent some years as a tutor turned actor in the households of two local Catholic families, the Hoghtons and the Heskeths.”

The claim that he had written seven plays by 1592 when the name was still unknown in London only adds to the ludicrousness that someone could write commercially successful plays and still never have his name mentioned by anyone or recorded in any comment in his entire ‘life’. If any playwright had made as much as half of this 200 pounds a year, Robert Greene would never have complained about any actor, and more poets would have turned to playwriting whether they were great or mediocre and there would be no need to write long dull poems to entice a ‘patron’. Southampton and other noblemen may have tried their hand when they lost their entire fortunes caring not a fig for their dependence upon the theatre that attracted unwholesome layabouts and coneycatchers. If Holden had read in a biography the excerpt of Greene’s ‘Groatsworth’, he may have seen that Greene never mentions an author, so he is even further off course giving the meaning of ‘upstart Crow’ as a plagiarist.

In a review of the book ‘Will in the World: How Shakespeare became Shakespeare’ by Stephen Greenblatt, in the National Post, October 16, 2004, the reviewer says, “It answers the question of Shakespeare’s ‘lost’ years between grammar school and his arrival on the London theatre scene with the proposal that Shakespeare was working as a tutor for Catholic families in the north of England. “Risking their lives by remaining Catholic, these recusant families also found Shakespeare his first gig as an actor”. If this were true it would be the single, only and isolated mention of William having the ability to be a tutor, to have ever acted anywhere, and of all the people in his large family or any other person of any family escaping out of Stratford and being sought as an ‘illegal Roman Catholic’. This is the man whom all other biographers and scholars since claim to be a favourite of this same Queen Elizabeth who wants more ‘Falstaff in love’. If her secret service knew him as a young lad on Henley street in far off Stratford in 1585, they would still know him in ‘1591’ as the famous Factotum turning out play after historical play while scratching off 154 sonnets concerning Southampton and an equal number of penned parchments saturated with saccharine verses of Venus and endless lines of Lucrece’s repetitive rapaciousness.

A reader of the Times Literary Supplement, Dorna Bewly of Cambridge, Ontario, wrote to the editor to inform of her attending ‘the ‘Searching for Shakespeare’ exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, the letter printed June 2, 2006.

“This conference was supported by various scholarly institutions including the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. During the conference it was stated by a leading academic and author that the death in 1596 of William Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet would have influenced the title the author Shakespeare later chose for his play Hamlet first registered on July 26, 1602.”

As reported in a Toronto newspaper article on May 20, 2000, another contender for the Folio Crown is one claimed by the Italian professor Martino Iuvara who says that the Author was Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza whose name is a literal translation of ‘Shakespeare’ while he points out that details in the life of Crollalanza are found in the Plays many of which are set in Italy or the characters are Italian.

These scholars fail to mention that the first reference to any performance of a play called ‘Hamlet’ appears in Thomas Nashe’s introduction to Robert Greene’s Menaphon in 1589: Nashe says “and if you entreate him faire on a frosty morning, hee will affoord you whole Hamlets, I should say hand fuls of Tragicall speeches.” The second reference to a performance of ‘Hamlet’ occurs in June 1594 at Newington Butts, for which Philip Henslowe’s Diary records a receipt for a single performance of Hamlet (not referred to as new) and taken to be a performance in repertory of the above, by Henslowe anyway. The third contemporary allusion to ‘Hamlet’; was made by Thomas Lodge in or before 1586 (Arden series) to the “ghost which cried so miserably at the Theatre like an oister wife, ‘Hamlet, revenge’. There was also reputedly a performance of ‘Hamlet’ in October 1593 at the Golden Cross Inn, Oxford. William Shakspere’s son, Hamnet, was born in 1585, and named after Shakspere’s friend and neighbour, Hamnet Sadler. This son Hamnet died on August 11, 1596, aged 11, well after the performances referred to above; the son’s death cannot therefore have influenced a play by this title, let alone a play already on tour.”

This is a strange claim as no one has listed a ‘William Shakespeare’ with that spelling of the Folio or any other spelling of the name in the town records including the family of John Shaksper on Henley Street. Who were the English cousin’s family ? It is no matter, no one ever mentioned a man by any form of that name in London during the reigns of Elizabeth and James.

After the family’s son, William, died prematurely, Crollalanza took the son’s name and lived as William Shakespeare. Crollalanza’s family once lived in Casa Otello, ‘built by a retired Venetian mercenary Otello who according, to a local legend, killed his wife out of misplaced jealousy’.”

“Crollalanza, born to a Sicilian family that fled to England during the Spanish Inquisition. In 1558, the young Crollalanza went to live in Stratford, where English cousins took him in.

In facing the disappointing documents finally uncovered in Stratford’s records none of which showed any association of William with the London theatre, those still determined to find some connection between the two, looked into all that was left of ‘the written word’, the Folio scripts. Any phrase, any single word found in the Plays was tested to see any possible similarity, either obvious or hidden, to anything in the life of the Stratford William.

All of Ms Bewley’s information is amply supplied by Stratford records and also in many of the biographies. How, then, does ‘a leading academic and scholar’ put forward such a statement to this conference called ‘Shakespeare: Portraiture, biography and the material world’, in conjunction with the National Portrait Gallery exhibition. Is this determination to ‘supply’ paltry evidence that the Author and William of Stratford are one and the same so desperate that the scholars still attempt to claim that what is known to be error is to be of value ?

Someone, preparing the crib sheets at the ‘Shakespeare’ exhibition, so believing the name to be Hamlet, types in that word and does not bother to examine the exhibited will to find the correct spelling of the name as Hamnet. Sadler clearly signs with that spelling but in the will the name is spelled ‘Hamlett’, two, ‘tt’, not one, but that person is not alone. The authority who required the sheet and seemingly read it, along with all other Gallery personnel who read it before or after it was posted beside the will, and all of those adulators who came to pay homage and so should know this rare but well known certainty in the life of this man do not raise anyone’s attention to this double oversight. Even those writers who know that he named his son after his neighbour, are now supportive that both were named Hamlet. Whether the name was left as Hamlet deliberately or not, the legend continues for all those hundreds of viewers that the Stratford man’s son was named Hamlet and that the father “named his play after his beloved son”. Not one interested person nor the biographers know that the original Hamlet was ‘Amleth’.

The Folger Shakespeare Library and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and all of those who contributed to this ‘Searching for Shakespeare’ exhibition sponsored the posting of the Last Will of William upon the wall that all may read, the genuine will that shows not one connection to the ‘London Author’. Of all the precisely listed holdings of this Stratford man, there is not one book, paper, or a favoured pen that is left to anyone. The will contains not one reference to anything of theatre or of literature.

This may be another indication that the wording and the events printed in the First Folio are not the same words and events that were heard by those who witnessed the original play.

“Hamlet: O God ! Ghost: Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder. Hamlet: Murder !”

The only time the Ghost speaks the word, ‘revenge’, it is not accompanied by ‘Hamlet’.

The ‘Hamlet’ now in the Folio is to have been ‘registered’ on July 1602 that is the date that the Registry Office accepted the forthcoming printing of the work and that date does not indicate the date of completion of writing or the first performance of the play. A play by the name ‘Hamlet’ was performed in June, 1594 by the Henslowe company and this and many other records kept by Henslowe clearly refutes the biographers’ claims that “the Lord Chamberlain his servants was the foremost or most popular company”, or that they were the only company to produce at least the originals of the Plays now found in the Folio. A play by Thomas Kyd called ‘Hamlet’ is now ‘lost’.

So ingrained into the public impression is that the Stratford village boy ‘Hamnet’ was truly the influence of the play title that many people still believe that William’s boy was called ‘Hamlet’, not being aware of the name ‘Hamnet’. Dorna Bewley, who does not spell the name with 11 letters, also attended the exhibition. She says further: “Shakespere’s will dated March 25, 1616, is also on display at the exhibition. Two transcription sheets rest on either side of the will to guide the viewer. They state that Shakespere left money to his friends, one of whom is described as ‘Hamlet Sadler’ on the crib sheet. Closer inspection of the will however, reveals that Sadler’s signature is ‘Hamnet Sadler whether written by the clerk or himself, not Hamlet.”

Several biographers also quote the Thomas Lodge statement of his witnessing at least one performance of the play, ‘Hamlet’, when the Ghost “cried so miserable like an oister wife, ‘Hamlet revenge’”, that it became almost a London cry as many used it in the streets, “Hamlet, revenge”. In all the quotations in the biographies, not one of the many recent authors makes note that in the Folio play the Ghost of Hamlet’s father never utters this phrase, ‘Hamlet, revenge’.

The patrons to the exhibition or any readers need only to borrow from their local Library the two volumes of amassed and total allusions ever printed concerning the Plays, their performances and commentary on them, and, in addition, every printed, documented reference to the man, William of Stratford, collected and published by E. K. Chambers to see for themselves whether there is any connection between the two names One name refers to a citizen of Stratford of the 16th century; the other is a name on eight Quartos only but revived on a Folio in 1623.

Robert J. Meyer

The fire ships caused some Spanish ships to cut cables and collide.

Martin Frobisher, the explorer, had led two expeditions to the New World seeking the Northwest Passage for England. As Vice Admiral of the ‘Primrose’, he had accompanied Drake in an expedition to the West Indies. Later, he commanded a fleet outfitted by Ralegh against the Spanish shipping of gold from the Panama. In 1594, Frobisher was mortally wounded off Brest, France, and died at Plymouth.

LONDON OF 1588

Francis Drake had sailed around the southern tip of South America and up the western coast almost to Vancouver Island. On a second trip, he crossed the Pacific, around the southern tip of Africa and back to England where Elizabeth knighted him aboard the Golden Hind. A third voyage to the West Indies included raiding the Spanish at Florida and returning colonists from Virginia to England. It was Drake who introduced tobacco brought back during this visit to America in 1585. The Spanish poet playwright, Lope de Vega, who sailed with the Armada, called Drake, “Satan himself…the incarnation of the genius of Evil”. In 1595, Elizabeth sent Drake and Hawkins on an expedition against the Spanish in the West Indies. Both men caught dysentery and were buried at sea.

These navigators urged Lord Howard to attack the Armada in their own Spanish waters but the weather delayed eight English fire-ships to spread among the Armada anchored near the Scilly Isles off France. Marlowe refers to the ‘fiery keel at Antwerp Bridge’ in his ‘Doctor Faustus’. A fire ship was used in 1585 to destroy the Duke of Parma’s bridge across the Scheldt.

The year of 1588 was even more momentous for London than was 1587. It was the 100th anniversary of the ascension to the throne of Scotland of Mary Stewart’s grandfather James IV. It was the 200th anniversary of a small Scottish invasion of England by nobles under Mary’s direct seventh generation ancestor, Robert II, in retaliation of two English invasions of Scotland. Now in retaliation of the execution of Mary Queen of the Scots, the largest invasion force in the history of England was preparing to invade under King Philip of Spain.

The Armada amassed 139 ships with 20,000 soldiers and sailors and they were drawn by the oars of Turkish and Moorish slaves caged below in the galleys. As in ‘Tamburlaine’, the Turkish Emperor, Bajazeth, named ‘Timur the Lame’, is drawn captive in his cage by Moorish slaves. Tamburlaine was the cruel ‘scourge of God’ against the Turks and the Moors. Now the Spanish fleet in a crusade against Protestant England uses the cruel enslavement of Mohammedans. On board the Armada were 600 monks, priests and chaplains who before battle chanted the prayer, ‘Our Lord, give us victory over the enemies of His faith’. To be assured of that victory, also on board were 1630 great ordnance, heavy canons. The Armada was to join with the Duke of Parma to escort his troops from Flanders to England to be a terrifying sight to see rising over the English horizon. Sir Walter Ralegh had explained that smaller ships, though not as impressive as the 1200 ton Spanish ships, were nimble and more manageable. A 600 ton ship could carry as much ordnance as the ships twice their size and they could turn broadside twice as fast. Ralegh would not be there for the Armada as he was in the New World. Marlowe’s patron of the ‘Admiral’s Men’, Lord Howard, the Admiral of the fleet, arrived at Plymouth on May 23rd with the main body of the Queen’s ships to join his officers with the remainder of the fleet. John Hawkins, (d. 595), the Rear Admiral in command of the Victory, had already engaged an attack off the coast of Veracruz and had gained valuable information on the Armada by pretending to betray Queen Elizabeth. As comptroller of the navy, he increased its size and made improvements in the rigging and construction of his ships.

Now the Duke was leading Spanish forces in Flanders that were to be picked up by the Armada.

Of the sad and dreadful notes of 1588, on September 4th, the Queen’s favourite, the Earl of Leicester died. As the patron of an acting company, he had provided for Marlowe the beginning of opportunities and for the other playwrights to follow. Due to excellent navigation and seamanship, England lost no ships in the battle but lost only 100 sailors. After the battle, more men were lost to sickness and to neglect in the streets of London than were lost in the battle. Lord Howard complained in a letter to Lord Burlegh on the tenth of August, 1588, “It is a pitiful sight to see here at Margate, how the men die in the streets having no place to receive them into here. It would grieve any man’s heart to see them that served so valiantly to die so miserable”. This letter was written to William Cecil nine days after the Admiral engaged the Armada. Marlowe, as one keenly interested in the Royal Court of Scotland, would have contrasted in his mind the conditions at Margate with the manner that men of battle would be honoured in the Scottish Court. After ‘Tamburlaine’ and the Armada, Marlowe never again glorified war.

One hundred years after Marlowe and the Armada, in November of 1688, William of Orange landed in England and marched into London.

Mary of Guise, the mother of Mary Queen of the Scots, was the daughter of Claude I, first Duc de Guise, son of Rene II, Duc de Lorraine who was married to Antionette Bourbon of the powerful French family. Henry IV, 1589 1610, was the first ruler of the House of Bourbon. Claude I fought against the Holy Roman Empire and the Anabaptists. His son, Francois, 2nd Duc de Guise, Mary of Guise’s brother and uncle to Queen Mary of the Scots, controlled the government of the young king, Francis II, with Charles of Loraine, his brother, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Rheims and Cardinal of Lorraine. He and his brother Claude I were the chief causes of the persecution of the Huguenots. When the brothers were ousted from power by Catherine de Medici after the death of Francis, they caused a civil war by their massacre of Huguenots at Wassy in 1562 where Francis was assassinated. His son, Henri de Lorraine, 3rd Duc de Guise, to avenge his father’s assassination took up the struggle against the Huguenots. During the Batholonew’s Day massacre, 1572, dramatized in Marlowe’s play, ‘Massacre at Paris’, the Duc de Guise personally supervised the murder of Coligny whom he believed to be a chief instigator of his father’s assassination. After the peace of 1576, he formed an alliance of Catholic nobles, the Holy League, to resume the war against the Huguenots. Henry III disbanded it, but it was revived in 1584 when the Huguenot Henry of Navarre was assigned to the throne as Henry IV. The Duc de Guise gained prestige and led the people of Paris in their insurrection, called the Day of Barricades on May 12th, 1588. The English fleet was readying to sail on May 23rd. The Duc de Guise had the chance to become king himself but he let the King escape the mob.

On Monday, the Armada was engaged at Gravelines which spent much of the Armada’s ammunition. On Wednesday, July 31st, 1588, the main body of the English ships slid out from Plymouth at dusk and anchored at Rame Head. In the morning, Lord Howard sent out his personal challenge to the Admiral of the Armada, the Duke of Medina Sidonia. The Spanish were driven past their rendezvous point with the Duke of Parma. Those that escaped Howard’s fleet were wrecked off the coast of Ireland. All those aboard drowned or were killed by the Irish. London rang with the sound of bells and cheering. Shouts went up around the inn yards and stages, applauding the thundering speeches of ‘Tamburlaine’. Processions continued into the nights by the light of bonfires. On November 24th, Elizabeth in her state coach with its golden crown canopy rode all along Fleet Street through the tumult of the crowd and up Ludgate Hill to the west cathedral door of St Paul’s.

The news of the Duc’s murder would make Christopher Marlowe’s play, ‘The Guise’ or ‘Massacre at Paris’, as instantly topical as the Armada victory made ‘Tamburlaine’ with both plays appearing at the same time in the summer and fall of 1588.

One month later, on June 1, he was appointed Lieutenant General of the Royal armies by the King, but shortly after, July or August, the Duc was assassinated by the King’s Guard. These events occurred at the time of the Armada, late July-August, when Marlowe was writing the history, 1572 1590, of the man who was still active at cruelty in Paris.

The Queen’s Court records of 1588 show performances by the Lord Admiral’s men appearing at Court in honour of the company’s patron who had defended England against the Armada that summer. One play was the timely ‘Tamburlaine’, the other was ‘The Massacre at Paris’ which mentions the Armada as ‘the King of Spain’s huge fleet’ with other topical references. Marlowe was the company’s chief playwright who had personal experience of Paris and Rheims. London’s popular actor, young Ned Alleyn, had the enviable role of the just murdered Duc de Guise. The Queen and her court would have been amply entertained. Plays on the open stages enacted by living people gave the playgoers for the first time the feeling that they were experiencing real events. It would have been almost as if one experienced the great events in person.In1588, the playgoers were clamouring for more plays after the extraordinary success of ‘Tamburlaine’. The German ‘Faustbuch’ had appeared that year in London and Marlowe took advantage of this book to write his ‘Doctor Faustus’. The details of the book lent themselves to the Marlowe manner. It provided the opportunity to highlight black magic and witchcraft on stage which was immensely popular. The astrologer, Simon Forman, wrote of 1588 in his diary, “It was the beginning of much sorrow and strife. It began to practice necromancy and to call angels and spirits.”

The concept of a man selling his soul to the Devil suggested great stage melodrama particularly when Marlowe wrote his main characters with his actor friend in mind. He knew how to utilize the tall, deep voiced actor Ned Alleyn. He knew that Ned would revel in this power to stir the crowd with the words that he gave him. Marlowe was encouraged to write a second part for ‘Doctor Faustus’ and to re write the entire play when an English translation of Faustbuch appeared in England in 1592 by “P.F. Gent.”. The gentleman, ‘P.F.’, has not been identified. The original ‘Historia von D. John Fausten’ published by an anonymous Lutheran in Frankfurt in 1587 was given the English title ‘The Historie of the damnable life and deserved death of Doctor John Faustus. Imprinted by Thomas Orwin and to be solde by Edward White, dwelling at the little north doore of Paules, at the signe of the Gun. 1592’.

Marlowe’s ‘Doctor Faustus’ was printed in a first edition in 1604. Two hundred and four years later, Wolfgang von Goethe wrote his ‘Doctor Faustus’. The times reflected in the two versions, Marlowe’s ‘Mephistopheles’ is gloomy, one who cannot forget his former glory while Goethe’s ‘Mephistopheles’ is jovial, one who fully enjoys his work.

Marlowe’s ‘Tamburlaine the Great’ is modeled after the Turkoman chieftain who in 1375 set out from his homeland in Transoxiana to conquer all before him beginning with the Persian town of Urgenj in 1375. In 1387, exactly 200 years before Marlowe wrote the play of his exploits, Timur captured Isphan and Shiriz and attacked Armenia and Georgia. In 1393, he took full possession of Mesopotamia. The Mongol chieftain, Ghengis Khan, conquered the Tartars in 1202, Turkestan in 1208 and died in 1227. Marlowe turned to entirely new subjects for his plays. From world events, he concentrated on the individual and concerned himself with delving into the mind of a man or a woman more intimately. His themes were no longer Sturm und Drang, great show and bombast, and his characters were more human if not humane. H began work on at least three plays, ‘The Jew of Malta’, ‘Arden of Faversham’ and ‘Macbeth’. He used as models the scenes and people familiar to him. In his one completed plays of 1589, ‘The Jew of Malta’, the daughter is an appealing human being much like his sister Margaret compared to the dash of Zenocrate in ‘Tamburlaine’.

The jokes in the plays ae very much the type of humour of this friend Thomas Watson and the countryside scene is the familiar Canterbury where he lived as a boy, a landscape that is also present in Arden of Faversham. Even in 1592, three years later, the listing at the Rose Theatre for the month of February shows that ‘The Jew of Malta’ brought in more money than the previous six plays by others. Staged on a Saturday night his play took in three times the amount of money than the play of the previous Saturday night, 50s to 17s 3p’. The earliest surviving edition of the play, the 1633 Quarto, begins: “This play, composed by so worthy an author as Master Marlowe and the part of the Jew by so inimitable an actor as Master Alleyn…”

LONDON OF 1589

Robert J. Meyer In 1589, the fortunes and destinies of England, Elizabeth I, Ralegh and Marlowe reversed.

The Armada defeat redirected world power from Spain to England to rule the seas and to colonize the New World. Elizabeth’s popularity quickly waned because of the expenditures and the abuse of Royal power but particularly from her being stingy with food for the army at Plymouth, the scandalous negligence in care for those who returned from the Armada battle and the decrepit conditions in Margate. At Court, she demoted Ralegh and took Devereux as her favourite. Ralegh, no longer Captain of the Queen’s Guard, left the Court. In that same year, he encouraged Edmund Spencer to return to London from Ireland to publish the first three books of his ‘The Faerie Queene’, several lines from which Marlowe had incorporated into his ‘Tamburlaine the Great’ plays when they were printed the following year of 1590.The name comes from ‘Timur the Lame’.

The reality of being a playwright as a livelihood was becoming apparent to Marlowe as playwriting was demanding and hard slogging when there were no royalties for plays. One had to keep selling them to a company and each had to be a commercial success for an author to be asked to write more. For subjects of his plays, Marlowe found the people around him, the intrigues in the courts of Paris and London. Now he had broadened his interest to the Court of James VI of Scotland. Marlowe’s friend and fellow playwright, Thomas Kyd, has written that Marlowe had made known to him his desire to go to Scotland for there a poet received honour from a King who was a patron of poets and playwrights. King James was a descendant of Banquo, his mother was Mary Queen of the Scots not yet two years in her grave. There is a common theme through his play ‘Macbeth’ and Marlowe’s other two plays, ‘Massacre at Paris’ and ‘Arden of Faversham’. Present in all three, and not to be found elsewhere, is the designing woman.

Husband, what mean you to get up so early ? Had I been wake, you had not risen so soon.” After the murder, “Alice: And, Susan, fetch water and wash away this blood but with my nails I’ll scrape away the blood. The more I strive, the more blood appears. In vain we strive, for here his blood remains.”

In ‘Macbeth’ there is an attempt to please James VI of Scotland as his ancestor, Banquo, is not involved in the real model for the plays, the murder of Duff by Donald. Further, the play’s purpose is to establish the right of Banquo’s heir, James, to the throne of England taking the place of the one who has no heirs, Elizabeth, who had put to death his mother, Mary. Elisabeth’s remorse can be implied for her treatment of her subjects, soldiers and sailors during her last days on the throne. Her polices became weak, her loyalties vacillated with Ralegh and others. She abused her real power, she chose less able ministers that were Cecil, Lord Burleigh and Walsingham who died in 1590. A revolt in Ireland led by Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, prompted her to choose the second Earl of Essex to lead an army against Tyrone which he did successfully but when he returned, he led a revolt against Elisabeth and was executed for it in 1601. Elizabeth died in March of 1603 and Banquo’s seed, James, came to the English Throne. “Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown.”

The Hollinshed Chronicles, where Marlowe found the basis for his ‘Edward II’, relates the killing of Duff and of Donald whose wife encourages him to murder, but nothing is said of any remorse. The Chronicles state, “A mysterious voice chastised him (Donald). The king with his voice being stricken into great dread and terror, passed the night without anie sleepe coming to his eies”. In Marlowe’s ‘Macbeth’ this becomes “Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more’.” ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Arden’ are similar in this theme of the woman’s remorse after encouraging murder for selfish desires with no basis for this in the Chronicles.

1589 introduced this new aspect in the women in Marlowe’s plays, an irony not present in the previous women. Joan of Arc in ‘Henry VI Part I’, which is a later version of Marlowe’s ‘Harey VI’ is a different Joan than in the Holinshed Chronicle. She calls on evil spirits and says to her English captors, “A plaguing mischief light on Charles and thee and may ye both be suddenly surpris’d by bloody hands in sleeping on your beds”

In ‘Massacre at Paris’, that woman is Catherine, the Queen Mother of France’s Charles who says, “Come, mother, let us go to honour this solemnity” to which the Queen adds the aside, “Which I’ll dissolve with blood and cruelty”. In Marlowe’s ‘Arden of Faversham’, the designing woman is Alice Arden who incited others to murder her husband so that she may marry her lover Mosbie. Mary Queen of the Scots in letters and sonnets written to her lover, James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, had instigated the idea of having her husband, Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, killed, a parallel to Alice Arden.

“Lady Macbeth: A little water clears us of this deed. Here’s the smell of blood still.”

In the play, ‘Macbeth’, written later in 1605, Lady Macbeth incites her husband to murder the Scottish King resulting in furthering the murder of Banquo whose sons become heirs to the throne from childless Macbeth paralleling Elizabeth’s sentencing to death of Mary whose son, James, became heir to England’s throne from the childless Elizabeth.

The new element in these three plays, the remorse or guilt felt by these cruel women for their deeds, is original with Marlowe. The main source of material for ‘Macbeth’ is the Hollinshed Chronicles which makes little mention of Lady Macbeth and none at all of their remorse. Yet, the speeches of the two women in Marlowe’s two plays take the same transformation.“AliceArden:

In his ‘Edward II’, Queen Isabella is an inciter, too, of one person against another though not of murder but even here her envy is rewarded by her son disowning her. Why was this theme repeated so consistently on from 1589 ? Marlowe’s experience that September may have had a direct bearing as the trauma and violence that afternoon of September 18 was as dramatic as any scene in his plays. At 2:30 when walking along Hog Lane in the district of Norton Folgate, up the wide road from Bishopsgate, he saw William Bradley coming toward him. Bradley, the son of an innkeeper of Gray’s Inn Lane, Holburn, owed a 14 pound debt to another innkeeper, John Alleyn, who was the brother of Ned Alleyn who was Marlowe’s leading actor. John Alleyn’s lawyer was Hugh Swift who happened to be Tom Watson’s brother in law. Swift on Allleyn’s behalf had given Bradley notice that he would file suit against him in the Court of Common Pleas and Bradley’s friend, George Orrel, threatened Swift with physical violence if he did so. Calling his bluff, Alleyn, Swift and brother in law Tom Watson took Bradley to Court and Bradley answered with a counter petition. At 2:30 that afternoon of September 18, Bradley was approaching Marlowe, a friend of both Watson and Allyn’s brother, so Bradley attacked Marlowe. It is at this point that it is realized that in 1589 gentlemen walked the streets of London with a sword at their sides. Marlowe was in the action of defending himself from this unexpected assault when Tom Watson appeared and intervened in the sword-fight and he killed Bradley. Although the several people who had gathered about to witness the duel had heard Bradley cry out at Watson‘s approach, “Arte thouwe nowe come ? Then I will have a boute with thee !”, both Watson and Marlowe were arrested on suspicion of murder and were thrown into Newgate Prison. Marlowe was allowed bail on October 1st, as |Richard Kytchine and Humphrey |Rowland stood bail at 20 pounds and Marlowe was bound over for 40 pounds. His fourteen days in Newgate changed him forever. Luke Hutton wrote in his ‘The Black Dogge of Newgate’, published in 1600 “A rat doth rob the candle from my hands, and then a hundred rats all sallie forth, While thus I lay in irons under ground, I heard a man that begged for release, And in a chaine of iron was he bound Begging one penny to buie a hundred bread, Hungered and sterved, for want of food layThedead.”normal method of execution was hanging, drawing and quartering for traitors. The site of public hangings was Tyburn near to day’s Marble Arch. After his two week stay in Newgate, Marlowe made additions to several of his plays, ‘The Jew of Malta’, ‘The Massacre’, ‘Edward II’ and ‘Doctor Faustus’: “Now, Faustus, let thine eyes with horror stare Into that vast perpetual torture house. There are furies tossing damned souls on burning forks.”

On December 3, 1589, Marlowe at the assizes stood before Judge Sir Roger Manwood and was released. When Manwood died, Marlowe wrote an epitaph for him in Latin in 1592.

While sailors died in the streets of London and poets were cast into Newgate Prison, where was William of Stratford ? William was still an innocent in Stratford. Biographers claim that he was already in London to satisfy the enigma of how a person from Stratford could have written plays without having attended a University and probably never having finished Free School.

From ‘Edward II’ “This usage make my misery increase, But can my air of life continue long, When all my senses are annoy’d with stench ? Within a dungeon England’s King is kept, here I am starved for want of sustenance.”

the Great’ is modeled after the Turkoman chieftain who was the son of the head of a Mongol tribe and a descendant of Genghis Khan. He was born at Kesh, near Samarkand and in 1375 he set out from his homeland in Transoxiana to conquer all before him beginning with the Persian town of Urgenj in 1375. In 1387, exactly 200 years before Marlowe wrote the play of his exploits, Timur captured Isphan and Shiriz and attacked Armenia and Georgia. In 1393, he took full possession of Mesopotamia. He captured Syria in 1400, Baghdad in 1401 and Smyrna in 1402. Racing the Bosporus, he defeated the Turkish Ottoman Sultan Bayezed or ‘Bajazed’ in Marlowe’s play. He was a greater technician than Genghis Khan, yet illiterate, planning his campaigns motionless over a chessboard. He died quietly in 1405 at 69, somewhere in Asia as he attempted to conquer China.

There is no evidence that William of Stratford ever wrote a play or was an actor and no one claimed that he did write the Plays until the Folio that was published in 1632 and only then when someone noticed a line in the poem by Leonard Digges dedicated to the ‘Author’ and included in the Folio that read ‘your Stratford moniment’ and some few readers assumed that that this man long in his grave since 1616, William of Stratford, was the Author, but until that time no one in London or at Stratford had mentioned anything in writing that this William was the Author or was able to write more than his name. Those several Londoners who visited his son in law, the Physician, and several prominent gentlemen are known to have been his patients, never once professed to anyone that they were assured that William was the Author, possibly as they knew positively that their physician’s father-in-law was not ‘the Author’. No one from the Theatres of London ever visited William of Stratford at any time. Not one person in London was interested enough to go to Stratford to visit or to inquire of any of William’s several remaining relatives before or after Marlowe’s1623.‘Tamburlaine

This era began with the death of Mary Queen of Scots. Mary Stuart was kept captive for eighteen years giving rise to many plots for her release. One was the Babington Plot of 1586.

Robert Poley, the spy of Sir Francis, would be present at the scene of Marlowe’s ‘death’ seven years later. King Philip of Spain was the widower of Elizabeth’s half sister, ‘Bloody Mary’, from Catherine, wife of Henry VIII, who in her five year rule of England (1553 1558) put to death almost 300 people on charges of heresy. Mary Stuart’s execution gave King Philip of Spain the pretext to prepare for war on England. Sir Francis’s agents in Europe were sending him information on the preparation of the Armada, Spain’s new fleet. His brother Thomas was a recruiting officer for Francis and he employed Marlowe to go to Rheims. This was late in 1586 or early 1587 before Marlowe’s coming to London, and while finishing his M.A. at Corpus Christi. He was to go to the seminary at Rheims, which was also a haven for dissident English Catholics, on the pretext that he was a potential convert. This journey through Paris to Rheims almost cost him his M.A. when he returned. Sir Francis appeared at the Privy Council to intercede on his behalf. Sir Francis stated that Marlowe’s trip was not to be construed as a betrayal of his faith. Marlowe came to London with an introduction to Thomas Watson, poet, Latin scholar and madrigal writer, a friend of the Walsinghams and a man-about-town who knew the actors. He was Marlowe’s mentor and probably his second best friend.

LONDON OF 1587

Robert J. Meyer Christopher Marlowe entered into London in late spring of 1587 at the age of 23. The two Londons that he met were both new and volatile each affecting the other. Those two Londons were not separate but finely inter meshed, the political and the theatrical. Several of the people were involved with both and the populace was totally involved both as supporters and protesters to the events that ensued. The next twenty years were both an end and a beginning.

This was the London that awaited Christopher Marlowe three months later. Of the fore mentioned cast: Sir Francis Walsingham was a cousin to Thomas Walsingham whom Marlowe had met while at Cambridge University, a man who would change man y moments of the rest of Marlowe’s seven years of his remaining life. Thomas gave Marlowe his patronage, introduced him to the literary people who were many and Thomas eventually made him his house guest at Scadbury in Chistlehurst south of Greenwich in Kent. Thomas was yet twenty six, his cousin was the Secretary of State and when his brother, Edmund, died two years later, he would inherit the family estate with a fifty pound annuity as sole heir under his father’s will.

Anthony Babington was a page to the Earl of Shrewsbury, the ‘keeper’ of imprisoned Mary. He was supported by champions of Mary in Paris and by King Philip of Spain who agreed to assist them. Babington was joined by a priest, John Ballard, to eliminate Queen Elizabeth and her ministers and to place Mary on the throne of England. Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, in his capacity of chief of spies brought in a special agent, Robert Poley, who infiltrated the conspirators, gaining incriminating evidence that he relayed to Walsingham. Ballard confessed more information under torture, others were imprisoned and Babington was hanged at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Babington’s plot finally convinced Elizabeth that Mary was personally active in the conspiracy. Mary was brought to trial in October, 1586, and sentenced on the 25th of that month but Elizabeth delayed signing the death warrant until the first of February 1587. Mary was executed one week later upon the outside grounds of the Tower

The City of London in 1587 had no theatres, not at least within the city walls as theatres were forbidden in the city. Two stages were the ‘Curtain’ and the ‘Theatre’ beyond Bishopsgate and outside the walls at the east side of the city. Thomas Watson lived at Bishopsgate working as a tutor to William Cornwallis’ son in that year. To be legal an acting company, in order to perform, had to have the patronage of a nobleman at or above the rank of Baron. One of the first noblemen to give his name to an acting company was the Earl of Leicester. The Queen’s favourite. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, established responsibility for a theatre for the first time. ‘Leicester’s Men’, the acting company that included James Burbadge, received Letters Patent in 1574 Two years later James Burbadge built the ‘Theatre’ in Shoreditch outside the city walls for Leicester’s Men. Another company on the scene, the Admiral’s Men, was patronized by Lord Howard, Lord Admiral of the fleet who soon would face the Spanish Armada. He had been involved in the recent trials of Babington and Queen Mary which were the responsibility of Sir Francis Walsingham, Lord Howard, who was Queen Elizabeth’s cousin.

Christopher Marlowe had two completed plays with him when he arrived from Cambridge that spring. ‘Tamburlaine Part I’ was put into immediate production that summer by the Admiral’s Men, the company for whom Marlowe was to write most of his plays. ‘Tamburlaine’ was the saga of a young shepherd who conquered the world and the play needed a charismic actor to play the title role. A young aspiring actor, Edward Alleyn, two years Marlowe’s junior, became famous for the part and was considered the most magnetic actor of the late Elizabethan era. ‘Tamburlaine’ was staged with such success that Marlowe wrote a sequel prepared from notes that he brought with him from Cambridge. It, too, was a great success, the ‘Tamburlaines’ had an immense effect upon the times and the times had greatly influenced the content of the secondOnly‘Tamburlaine’.sevenyears before, Sir Francis Drake had returned from circum navigating the Earth, proving beyond all doubt that the World was spherical, doubts that had lingered in spite of Kopernik the astronomer and Columbus 100 years before. Sir Walter Ralegh, too, had roamed the new seas, some people believing that ‘Tamburlaine’ had been written with Ralegh in mind. He, like Tamburlaine, was thought to be a hero but one that was alive among them. He, like Drake, had caught the imagination of the people. Sea captains that were opening the world for England to adventure, to danger of course, but also to gold, jewels, prosperity, all just beyond the expanding horizon. Although rumours of war were on that horizon too, the popularity of ‘Tamburlaine’ continued for months to inspire the common man with every performance. Here was an entirely new form of information, patriotism and enthusiasm from two very young Englishmen. The Marlowe Alleyn partnership spread throughout the City from the stage of the outdoor theatre and the common man wanted more of those rousing plays with great thundering speeches from real people. ‘Tamburlaine’ Parts 1 and 2 were quickly imitated by other playwrights and friends of Marlowe.

George Peele wrote ‘The Battle of Alcazar’, ‘Perimedes’ and ‘Alphonsus’. Robert Greene wrote ‘The King of Aragon’ in the next two years and Thomas Kyd wrote ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ in the same year. Thomas Nashe had already co authored ‘Dido, the Queen of Carthage’ with Marlowe at Cambridge. ‘Tamburlaine’ revealed to the London audiences that there were new lands to be discovered because the world was no longer flat, chains of ignorance were being slowly broken, the world was enlarging and knowledge was enlightening minds throughout the city.

New ideas could be discussed but only within private circles. A group of men of ideas came together in argument, exchange of opinion and thought in what was called ‘the School of Night’ but only by those who did not belong but presumed what was discussed. This ‘School of Night’ was also known by some as ‘Ralegh’s Men’ for he was the leader of the group of men who collected occasionally at his house. The gentlemen discussed scientific experiments, probabilities, new concepts. Ralegh was a favourite at Court and he had won a wager with the Queen that he could measure the weight of smoke. A Ralegh’s man was Thomas Heriot, an astronomer and mathematician who with Johannes Kepler demonstrated that the Prime Mover, ‘primum mobile’, could not exist. Another ‘member’ of the group was Marlowe and he was reported to be a shocking, rigid-minded one by his frank logic. Many of the concepts of the old beliefs and of the new were incorporated into Marlowe’s plays, notably ‘Doctor Faustus’. Sir Walter in that year of 1587 although the Armada was expected at any day, organized a voyage to colonize the New World in the present area of South Carolina. Ralegh appointed the artist John White as governor and with 150 people, he set sail from Plymouth on the 8th of May. In Thomas Walsingham’s house 200 years later, watercolours of aborigines of the new world were found, probably painted by John White who accompanied them. Ralegh was the Renaissance Man and Marlowe had caught his feelings for the times, adventure into the unknown, exciting new ideas, men of courage, boldness, yet cruelty and war. ‘Tamburlaine’, both parts, were printed in the extant version in 1590 and it was a resounding success revealing for the first time the great possibilities of the theatre stage. Also during the year 1587, the ‘Rose’ theatre was built by Philip Henslowe, a dyer and pawnbroker in his early thirties, along with John Chomley, a grocer. Its site is on Rose Alley, south of St Paul’s Church on London’s south bank. The ‘Rose’ was enlarged during 1591 1592. It was uncovered during an excavation in 1988 9.

VERSIONS OF MACBETH (I) Robert J. Meyer

The actors of the Folio Macbeth never describe the three women as ‘witches’. They are listed as ‘Three Witches’ in the Dramatis Personae that could have been altered from the original. In the text of the play, the first woman states that a sailor’s wife had called her ‘witch’, but all three women refer to themselves as ‘the weird sisters’. Late in the play, Macbeth, angered by their final predictions, calls them ‘filthy hags’, but Banquo’s initial dialogue describes them as being ‘so wild in their attire, that they look not like the inhabitants of the earth’. This correlates to Holinshed’s description in his ‘Chronicles’, 1578, clearly as ‘three women in strange and wild apparel resembling creatures of elder world’, not ‘other’ or ‘nether’ world. The author of the play, having referred to this two volume illustrated edition of the Chronicles in order to quote from it, sometimes verbatim, would have had the opportunity to see the fine woodcut of Macbeth and Banquo on horseback meeting these ‘three women’ who are pictured as ordinary women dressed in full length embroidered or quilted skirts and jackets, puffed sleeves and elaborate tires and head dresses appearing much as the Elizabethan wardrobe existing today in London Museums. The women have no facial hair as when Banquo questions them with ‘You should be women and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so’. This is the total of the descriptions as heard by the audience of today, but what did the audience of 1610 see and hear on stage ?

What did the theatre audience of the early 1600’s see and hear ? Were the plays performed from the script found in the Quartos, now branded as ‘maimed and deformed’ ? Were the other plays that were never printed until the First Folio unlike those versions now accepted as the original intent of the Author ‘as he conceived them’ ?

What are thought to be ‘errors’ can be pointed out in Forman’s account of the plot. There is no attempt by Lady Macbeth to ‘hide’ the daggers, unless Forman means to ‘hide’’ them away from any room of the Macbeths when she takes them into her own hands and places them where Lennox finds the daggers ‘on the pillows’ of those in the King’s chamber. Forman is quite specific in saying that both Macbeth and his wife could not wash off the blood ‘by any means’. In the Folio, no attempt is made by either to wash off the blood on stage. Lady Macbeth says assuredly that ‘a little water clears us of this deed. How easy it is then”. Later, while sleepwalking she does not imagine that the blood is still on her hands.

The diarist, Simon Forman, has left a detailed review of a performance of Macbeth consisting of 50 or more printed lines that begin: “In Mackbeth at the Glob, 1610, the 20 of April (Sat.) there was to be observed first how Mackbeth and Bancko, 2 noble men of Scotland, and Riding thorowe the wod, ther stode before them 3 women feiries or Nimphes.” What Forman saw upon the stage were three women who to him were fairies or nymphs, far from the familiar hairy hags or cackling crones with crooked canes, but what did Forman hear ? “And saluted Mackbeth, saying 3 tyms vnto him, haille Mackbeth, king of Coden; for thou shalt be a kinge but shall beget No kinges, &c. Then said Bancko, what all to Mackbeth And nothing to me. Yes, said the nimphes, haille to thee Bancko, thou shall beget kings, yet be no kinge.”This can be Forman’s paraphrasing of the dialogue remembered from seeing the entire play, but he kept notes daily. It is at odds with the text of the Folio but how much at odds with what was spoken on that stage ? If Forman is paraphrasing, he is doing so still in the style of his day, not as would be paraphrased in later centuries, ‘What all to Macbeth and nothing to me’ sounds like a line that would have introduced his words addressed to the women after his words to Macbeth as well as the Folio’s “To me you speak not.” Forman’s “Haille to thee Bancko, thou shall beget kings yet be no kinge” becomes the ear as well or possibly better than ‘Thou shalt get kings though thou be none’ of the Folio.

Audiences prefer to have actions performed before them on the stage and not be told about actions having happened off stage.

Macb: “Where?” Lennox: “Here, my good lord.” Lennox is indicating Macbeth’s seat, the ‘place reserv’d”, now filled with the ‘invisible’ ghost. Since the guests expected Banquo to be present, assuming that Macbeth did too, a vacant seat for Banquo would also be placed by the servants and also a seat for Macbeth, but Macbeth says, “The table’s full.” This would rightly reveal that Macbeth was not expecting Banquo as only Macbeth could order the servants to set only so many seats. The absence of a seat for Banquo would give the guests reason for suspicion once they had seated themselves, and none of this reasoning is expressed in the Folio version.

Macb: “The table’s full”. Lennox: “Here is a place reserv’d, sir.”

“Here’s the smell of the blood still”, only the smell of blood, not that the blood would not come off. Macbeth does not complain of blood on his hands. Was there a scene that Forman says was enacted wherein both perpetrators of the murder try desperately to rid themselves of the telltale blood with great utterances betraying their rising frustrations as they try to wipe and wash again and again, their first terrifying shock of fear of being found out ?

Another discrepancy is Forman’s saying: “In the meantime, while Macduff was in England, Macbeth slew Macduff’s wife and children”. Was there another now missing or altered scene where Macbeth does kill Macduff’s family ? Forman could hardly mistake a pair of murderers for Macbeth as he is writing this account in his diary soon after the performance. Forman is specific to say in the instance of Banquo’s murder that Macbeth ‘contrived’ the death of Banquo and ‘caused’ him to be murdered, but in this murder of the wife and children, he says that ‘Macbeth slew’ them. Who made the error of having the three women hail Macbeth not as the Thane of Cawdor but as the ‘King’ of Cawdor, Forman in remembering it, the actresses in saying it, or the one who wrote or later altered the script ?

Forman describes well the feast scene where Macbeth “began to speak of noble Banquo and to wish that he were there. And as he thus is, standing up to drink a carouse to him, the ghost of Banquo came and sat down in this chair behind him. As he, turning about to sit down again, saw the ghost of Banquo which affronted him so that he fell into a great passion of fear and fury, uttering many words about his murder.”

His account is again at variance with the Folio. He is correct in his logic that everyone present, not knowing Banquo was, by then, dead would have expected him to be there and that Macbeth, too, would be expecting him. Forman is most specific that Macbeth voiced his wish that Banquo be there and that Macbeth stood up from sitting down ‘to drink a carouse to him’. The Folio text is quite opposed. Macbeth does not speak of ‘noble Banquo’, but rather, ‘challenges’ him for ‘unkindness’ for being absent and not through ‘mischance’. Macbeth never proposes a toast to him and is never seated during the scene. From the time he enters, Act iii, Scene iv, he bids his guests to sit saying that he himself “will mingle with society and play the host” further saying “here I’ll sit in the midst”, but he does not. Rather, he goes over to the door, speaks with the First Murderer and returns to where Lennox bids him sit. At this point, the stage direction calls for Banquo’s ghost to sit ‘in Macbeth’s place’. Ross now invites Macbeth to sit.

Ross: “Please’t your highness to grace us with your royal company”

What else is rank ? In the Folio, when Macduff learns of the deaths of his wife and children, he suitably cries out in a rampage of rage and despair, but is it not strange that when the two sons of King Duncan, Malcolm and Donalbain, enter upon Macbeth and are immediately told by Macduff, ‘Your royal father’s murder’d, neither son rushes to the King’s side, falls upon his knees and cries: “O succor in my youth, font of my seed ! What devil dog has dared to drive these daggers Down to their dread dungeons deep within thee ?”

Nothing else, and Donalbain says nothing whatever and neither son speaks again until down at the bottom of the page. Was a more logical and dramatic outcry omitted here ?

The ‘Macbeth’ that Forman saw differed in many respects, yet this was a performance at the Globe and cannot be summarily dismissed as a ‘bad’ Quarto or a ‘pirated’ one or as ‘foul papers’ as have been the printed Quartos or any version not conforming in content to the text of the First Folio. This was not from a published script but from a performance of the authentic script that was protected by authority of the Globe.

In 1611, Forman wrote similar full accounts of seeing Cymbeline and A Winter’s Tale at the Globe. The most revealing information derived from Forman’s accounts of these performances is that, as explicit and detailed as he is in the time, the place and the action of the production of the plays, he never mentions who was the author of those plays.

If Forman is doubted of being able to remember a line of the play, what of Macbeth himself in the Folio ? In Act V, Scene iii, Macbeth says. “The spirits that know all moral consequences have pronounc’d me thus: “Fear not, Macbeth, no man that’s born of woman shalt e’er have power upon thee”. Whereas, in Act IV, Scene I, the second apparition says only “For none of woman shall harm Macbeth”, or did the apparition in the 1610 play actually say what Macbeth remembers in the Folio ?

No, Malcolm meets the crushing words, ‘royal father’s murder’d’ with “O, by whom ?”

SIMON FORMAN’S ACCOUNT OF MACBETH II Robert J. Meyer

The murder being knowen, Dunkins 2 sonns fled, the on to England, the other to Walles, to save themselves. They being fled, they were supposed guilty of the murder of their father, which was nothinge so. Then, was Mackbeth crowned kinge, and then he for feare of Bancko, his old companion, that he should beget kings but be no kinge him selfe, he continued the death of Banko, and caused him to be Murdred on the way as he Rode. The next night, being at supper with his noble men whom he had bid to a feaste to whiche also Banco should have com, he began to speake of Noble Banco, and to wish that he wer there. And as he thus did, standing vp to drincke a Carouse to him, the ghoste of Banco came and sate down in this cheier behind him. And he turninge About to sit down Again sawe the goste of Banco, which fronted him so, that he fell into a great passion of fear and fury, vttering many wordes about his murder, by which, when they hard that Banco was Murdred they Suspected Mackbet.”

Simon Forman’s description of the performance of ‘Macbeth’ is included in a manuscript in the Ashmolean Library, MS 208, a facsimile is printed in S. Schoenbaum’s ‘Records and Images’, 1981. Forman’s manuscript, ‘The Booke of Plaies and Notes therof per Formans for Common Pollicie’ may have been transcribed from his diary.

“Then Mack doue fled to England to the kings sonn, And soe they Raised an Army, And cam into Scotland, and at dunston Anyse ouerthru Mackbet. In the mean Tyme whille Macdoue was in England, Mackbet slewe Mackdoues wife & children, and after in the battle Mackdoue slewe Mackbet. Obserue Also how mackbets quen did Rise in the night in her slepe, & walke and talked and confessed all, & the doctor noted her wordes.”

“In Macbeth at the Glob, 1610, the 20 of Aprill (Sat.) ther was to be observed, firste, how Mackbeth and Bancko, 2 noble men of Scotland, Ridinge thorowe a wod, ther stode before them 3 women feiries or Nimphes, And saluted Mackbeth, saying 3 tyms vnto him, haille Mackbeth king of Coden; for thou shalt be a kinge, but shall beget No kinges, &c. Then said Bancko, what all to Mackbeth and nothing to me. Yes, said the nimphes, haille to thee Bancko, thou shalt beget kings, yet be no kinge. And so they departed & cam to the Courte of Scotland to Dunkin king of Scots, and yt was in the dais of Edward the Confessor. And Dunkin bad them both kindly welcome. And made Mackbeth forth with the Prince of Northumberland, and sent him hom to his own castell, and appointed Mackbeth to prouide for him, for he wold Sup with him the next dai at night, & did so. And mackbeth Contrived to kill Dunkin, & thorowe the persuasion of his wife did that night Murder the kinge in his own Castell, beinge his gueste. And ther were many prodigies seen that night & the dai before. And when Mackbeth had murdred the kinge, the blod on his hands could not be washed of by Any means, not from his wives handes, which handled the bloddi daggers in hiding them, By which means they became moch amazed and Affronted.

The ‘Introduction’ to the ‘Arden Edition, 1984’, of Macbeth by Kenneth Muir comments upon Forman’s account of the April 20, 1610 performance of the play: “Forman gives an impossible date since 20 April did not fall on a Saturday in 1610” but on a Friday and so Muir refers to this as “a performance at the Globe in the spring of 1611”. In Forman’s detailed description of the play, why would he have recorded not the wrong day but the wrong year ? Did the writer, Muir, not realize that England did not adopt the present Gregorian calendar until 1752 at which time a correction of an eleven day discrepancy was made and the day after Sept. 2, 1752 became Sept. 14 ? However, this is the least of the doubts that he casts upon Forman’s theatre review, saying further, “His account of the play was apparently mixed with memories of Holinshed.” He is referring to ‘Women feiries or nymphes’ which historian Holinshed and Forman each use to describe the ‘weird sisters’ but it is a description missing in the Folio play. This statement is made as if Forman’s memories of Holinshed’s history that he may or may not have read would be more vivid than the play he had seen that week. The Author of Macbeth also follows Holinshed’s phrases closely in this short scene as with other similarities.

‘What all to Mackbeth and nothing to me’ in Forman’s account with ‘Nothing for me at all?” in Holinshed; ‘In the name of truth, are ye fantastical ?’ in the Folio with “But some fantasticall illusion’ in Holinshed; ‘By Sinel’s death I know I am Thane of Glamis’ in the Folio with ‘Thane of Glamis…by the death of his father Sinell’ in Holinshed; ‘How far is’t call’d to Forres ?’ in the Folio with ‘Journied towards Fores’ in Holinshed. The hailing by the three sisters and their predictions are almost identical in all three wordings. The writer, Muir continues: “The indelible stains of blood were presumably suggested by Macbeth’s speeches after the murder and Lady Macbeth’s in the sleep walking scene.” There is no indelibility of blood in the Folio scene directly after the murder of Duncan, no washing and no anguish of trying to wipe off the blood of either, and Forman could not confuse this detailed two character scene with the brief mention of blood in the sleep-walking scene where Macbeth is not present. He says of Forman: “He makes a bad mistake in supposing that Macbeth was created Prince of Northumberland (or Cumberland).” The editor may say only that Macbeth being created Northumberland is not in the Folio version. He cannot justly say that Forman ‘makes a bad mistake in supposing’, as Forman does not suppose, he reports on what he saw. “And Dunkin bad them both kindly welcome and made Mackbeth forth with Prince of Northumberland and sent him home to his own castell.” Muir says of Foreman: “He makes no mention of the cauldron scene although, as an astrologer, he should have been interested in the prophecies in this scene.” Forman is now expected to make comment on every aspect of the entire play or he cannot be trusted. The cauldron scene may not have been in the performance that he witnessed. The weird sisters open the Folio play but several scholars are convinced that scenes one, two and the first part of three were not originally in the play and that the play began with the appearance of Banquo and Macbeth riding through the wood to Fores just as Forman describes it. “Ther was to be observed firste how Mackbeth and Bancko …Ridinge thorowe a wod..”

Forman describes an appalling scene of blood after the murder of the King. “The blood on his hands could not be washed off by Any means, nor from his wives hands which handled the bloodi daggers in hiding them, by which means they became moch amazed and Affronted.” This scene in the Folio version is not so appalling or fearful. There is no demonstration of not being able to wash off the blood from their hands. Lady Macbeth is not ‘amazed and affronted’ but orders Macbeth to “Retire we to our chamber; a little water clears us of this deed; how easy it is then. Your constancy hath left you unattended. Be not lost so poorly in your thoughts.” This she remembers while sleepwalking as “Wash your hands; put on your nightgown; look not so pale”. This is not the appalling scene that Forman describes. The references to ‘blood’ on their own hands in the sleepwalking scene are few. “What, will these hands ne’er be clean ?” does not refer to Lady Macbeth’s own hands however an interpreting actress may wipe and wring her hands on this line, but is a response to the remembrance of Macbeth’s question to her previously

“Never the less there is no reason to believe that the play witnessed by Forman was substantially different from that performed before the king five years previously.” Yes, but where is the evidence that King James saw an ything other than what Forman saw and reported.? “Forman was inaccurate in his account of other plays and he may have recorded his impressions after a lapse of days or weeks.” A footnote here explains: “Forman does not mention Hermione’s survival or the Queen in Cymbeline” Forman is now suspected for what he omits. Forman is mistaken, inaccurate, mixed with memories of texts throughout but this is, perhaps, because he may have written after a ‘lapse of days or weeks’ If Forman could not remember a play after a week, how did he gain a fine reputation as a diarist making notes each day ?

The critic says: “The discrepancy between the times given for the murder would not be noticed by the audience. Shakespeare could not allow Lady Macbeth in the sleep walking scene to count twelve strokes.”

This critic, Daniel Amneus, claims that in the original play Duncan makes Macbeth the Prince of Cumberland and not Malcolm, thereby giving Macbeth succession to the throne with no need to murder for it, but later Lady Macbeth persuades him to murder Duncan, and they do this at two o’clock in the morning. In the Folio version, the time is just after midnight! Yet in the sleepwalking scene, Lady Macbeth remembers the clock striking, “One; two: why, then ‘t is time to do ‘t.” Is this scene left over from the first version or was it merely annoying to have her count to twelve ?

“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand ?”, as she follows this now with her answer, “No more o’ that, my lord, no more of that. You mar all with this starting.” Yet, in the Folio version, Lad y Macbeth is not present when Macbeth asks his question.

“Lady Macbeth first decides to incite her husband to commit the deed, then she decides to use her keen knife herself; then she apparently proposes a joint murder, and finally Macbeth does the deed on his own.”

Now the critic writer describes the Author presumably writing of a murder at midnight but not allowing Lady Macbeth to count to twelve, so she must stop at ‘two’ which is the time of the murder in another version. No one explains why there are so many versions if ‘Shakespeare’ is so perfect that his ‘fellows’ ‘scarce received from him a blot in his papers’ as John Heminges and Henry Condell are to have written to the ‘Readers’ in the 1632 Folio after they both were deceased. This critic must imagine that an author would personally decide which lines were to be read in performances of the various versions over a period of twelve years. This performance he says was in 1611 not 1610, yet, the King’s performance was five years earlier in 1606 but when was it written ?

Muir says: “The report by Forman may be influenced by memories of Holinshed; and it is surely improbable that, in the performance he witnessed, Shakespeare’s fellows used the 1599, not the 1606 version of the play, the earlier version being nevertheless unavailable to the Folio editors.” Is it not possible that the 1606 version, too, was unavailable and that it surely was what Forman describes, a different version than the Folio ? Then why all the criticism of the Forman account ? Who wrote these versions that are the ‘same’ but not the same. An entire list of ‘apparent changes’ follows.

This critic assumes that this play is written by ‘Shakespeare’, a name that, to him as with others, means William, the Man from Stratford, even though no one before the Folio date of 1623 ever recorded that they knew who was ‘Shakespeare’, the name that appeared only on two books of verse and some single Quartos and the Man from Stratford was first chosen by someone who is not recorded as having claimed to have done so and it was assumed generally by the reference in one edition of the Folio of the verse of tribute phrase ‘your Stratford moniment’. No one has explained how the author of that line, Leonard Digges, assumed that the monument in ‘Stratford’, as he didn’t mention the church, was of the Author of the Plays. This critic also refers to the members of the acting company as ‘Shakespeare’s fellows’ which is another assumption that the actors were well acquainted with someone in their company called ‘Shakespeare’. No one in the company or elsewhere in London ever claimed that ‘Shakespeare’ was a member much less a director or a co owner of the Burbadge players company. Any audience would hoot at this discrepancy about the time stated to be what they just have heard differently, two strokes, not twelve. It is the droning, boring utterances of the five men of nobility in ‘The Tempest’, whose utterances the meaning of which ‘would not be noticed’ or be remembered

Several critics argue that the performance was in Elizabeth’s reign, before 1603, but authors Dover Wilson and Arthur Melville Clark agree that it was written in 1601. Daniel Amneus, in 1599, lists nineteen unsolved problems with this play due to ‘cuts and alterations’ in 1606. “Some of the problems”, says this critic, “may rather be due to carelessness on Shakespeare’s part, there are similar discrepancies in many of his plays.”

What is this ? A careless William who ‘could not allow’ a count of twelve, or could not associate his play with the Gowrie conspiracy or ‘would not have dared to write a play which gave approval to a rebellion against a reigning monarch after learning James the First’s strong views on the matter’ ?

Do none of the critics, scholars and editors entertain the possibility that once a play was written, by whoever wrote it, it was fair game for the plays to be re written, juxtaposed or even ‘ad libbed’ with permission of the theatre owners, the Burbadges, as would suit their purposes without a by your leave with no interference from the author or from whoever pasted the scripts together from this parchment or that. As George Saintsbury said, portions of the play and specifically “the second scene are in verse and phrase whole stages older than the bulk of the play”.The critic, Kenneth Muir, now concedes that Daniel Amneus claims that Duncan did make Macbeth the Prince of Cumberland in the original play and that the 1599 version was considerably different than the 1606 version. Since Forman’s account seems to describe the earlier play, the critic still doubts that William’s ‘fellows’ [that jolly word again] would not be presenting the ‘1606’ play in 1606. Only some modern scholars estimate at the 1606 date, many do not. Only in the opinion of our contemporary critics are the Folio plays superior to any of their other versions. The Folio plays most popular today were not the favourites of the early 17th century just as in later years the audiences accepted only Colley Cibber’s rewrite of ‘Richard III’ and of his several other rewritten vewrsions. So why is the Folio version sacrosanct with all of its scenes ‘perfect in their limbs, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them’ when this collage may have been the only copy lying about at the time of printing ?

One thing is certain. Only one copy of each play was taken to the printers in 1622-23 and the wording differs greatly from any other still available Quarto, copy or excerpt and those particular copies were not then given to any University or Library and they do not exist today. No one can compare the wordings of the original texts with the versions printed today with those of the ‘original’ copies. Were these original manuscripts destroyed so that the handwriting could not be compared with the handwriting of other authors of the time ? Were the words written on the manuscripts of the play ‘Macbetth’ dissimilar to any of Forman’s words that he wrote down to describe the performance of ‘Mackbeth’ that he witnessed on Saturday April 20, 1610 ? Were all ‘manuscripts’ taken to the printers destroyed so that the hand written words could never be compared with the hand writing of any of the many contemporary dramatists ?

The foremost critics had other opinions. Alexander Pope (1688 1744): “Not golden blood, what he meant is ‘gory blood.” Samuel Johnson (1709 84): “No amendment can be made to this line of which every word is equally faulty, but by a general blot ” Out with it ! Malone: “Not breech’d with gore, ‘sheaf’d’ with gore’”. Johnson: “Drench’d.” Others: “Reech’d” No, “Hatch’d”. It matters not to the actor what the ‘true intent’ is. The emotions that he expresses to the audience by those puzzling lines are real. The author, any author of a play, must, if the author is true, judge his finished lines on the basis of how they sound when read aloud, not of how they appear to the eye upon the page.

“Besides, this Duncan hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet tongu’d, against The deep damnation of his taking off; And pity, like a new born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s Cherubims, hors’d Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall drown the wind.”

MACBETH WHAT DOES IT MEAN ? Robert J. Meyer

There are barely two like interpretations of the Macbeth soliloquy, “If it were done, when ‘tis done’ as to the meaning of several lines. The actor interpreting Macbeth’s reasoning whether the act of murdering the King is even feasible ends with the conclusion that Duncan is innocence personified, and the lines provided give the actor the means to raise in the audience the passion of horror that his murder would create.

The two similes that describe ‘pity’, ‘like a newborn babe’ and ‘like heaven’s Cherubims hors’d upon the sightless couriers of the air’, have driven the scholars to write tomes of footnotes to ‘explain’ the meanings. These similes removed, it is simply ‘and pity, bestriding the blast, shall blow the horrid deed in(to) every eye’. The scholars have envisioned every possible combination of images a newborn babe riding on the blast, cherubs riding horses and winged heads of babies blowing the four winds as those depicted on the corners of old maps.

How do the commentators revere the Author as the greatest poet playwright when they cannot agree on much of what the Author was expressing ? The story of Macbeth that is told straightforwardly by Holinshed or whoever wrote this particular chronicle, is not complex, but easily comprehended and followed. When translated into poetry in the play, it is only reasonable that the tale will be told dramatically in the language, forms and metaphor, in all the deceits of that time, to allow the characters to express their feelings in ways not usually found in prose or in poems.It has been the actors in their reading of these lines that have kept these plays vibrant over the centuries. “Oh, but initially there must be great lines for the actors to read ” It is easily shown that within the text of what is expressed by the actors are those puzzling lines that set scholars off ‘in all directions’ to explain the authors’ ‘real intent’. Of what value is it to transpose to poetry if some lines are not clearly understood or are completely misinterpreted ? Much of the controversy was stirred by 18th and 19th century ‘scholars of repute’ when it was the fashion to delve into texts to correct all that ‘made no sense’, each editing the plays to reveal the true intent of the Author to raise his poetry to the Greatness he deserved. Macbeth: “Here lay Duncan, his silver skin lac’d with this golden blood, There, the murtherers, Steep’d in the colours of their trade, their daggers unmannerly breeched with gore.”

The first recorded performance of ‘Macbeth’ is in 1611, the next recorded performance is 53 years later in 1664 signifying its ‘great’ popularity.

On the one occasion when the Folio text was presented as printed, it was firmly rejected as the audience would tolerate no genuine substitute.

The great artist, William Blake, pictured the misinterpretations of these lines with “Angels of Life and Death riding on horses across the sky, a naked baby as the soul of a dead woman on the seashore”.Theseimmortal

lines are heard from the stage eliciting sympathetic feelings whether or not the audience of erudite scholars of the play clearly understand exactly what it meant by them. It is only certain that it, in its expressed entirety, Macbeth’s soliloquy conveys emotions that are felt without the necessity to paraphrase the means of their conveyance into prose within the mind.We do not know if these are the self same tune and words that the audience of 1610 enjoyed. We do know for certain that the ‘Richard III’ Play enjoyed for the next 150 years had very little similarity to the ‘Richard III’ known today, yet every great actor for that century and a half kept audiences spellbound with their living portrayals of ‘Richard’ with verse after verse written by Colley Cibber and others along with including excerpts from several other plays, all presented under the name of ‘Our Great Dramatist’ who never heard them much less wrote them

MARLOWE TO LONDON

The Queen’s Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, was a cousin to Thomas Walsingham whom Marlowe had met while at Cambridge University, the man who gave Marlowe his patronage, introduced him to the literary people and eventually made him his houseguest at Scadbury in Chistlehurst south of Greenwich in Kent.

Marlowe came to London with an introduction to Thomas Watson, poet, Latin scholar, madrigal composer, a friend of the Walsinghams and a man about town who knew the actors. He was Marlowe’s mentor and probably his best friend.

Robert J. Meyer Mary, Queen of the Scots, was the daughter of James V by his wife Mary of Guise (1515 1560). Christopher Marlowe’s play ‘The Massacre at Paris’ was also known as ‘The Guise’, referring to the Duc de Guise, brother of the Kings, Charles and Henry of France. The Duke was loyal to Philip of Spain rather than to his brother, the King of France, and he was responsible for the persecution of Protestant Huguenots which led to their slaughter at Paris on Bartholomew’s Day in 1572. The king of France was killed and the Huguenot, Henry de Navarre, came to the French throne. In Marlowe’s play, Henry says of de Guise, “Did he not cause the King of Spain’s huge fleet to threaten England and to menace me ?”

In the late spring of 1587, Christopher Marlowe walked into London at the age of twenty three. The two Londons that he met were separate but inter meshed, the political within the city walls and the theatrical just outside the eastern wall. The following twenty years were both an end and a Thosebeginning.yearsbegan with the end of Mary Queen of the Scots. Mary Stuart was kept captive for eighteen years giving rise to many plots for her release. One was the Babington Plot of 1586. Anthony Babington was a page for the Earl of Shrewsbury and the ‘keeper’ of the imprisoned Mary. He was supported by champions of Mary in Paris and King Philip of Spain in turn agreed to assist them. Babington was joined by a priest, John Ballard, in the plot to eliminate Queen Elizabeth and her ministers and to place Mary onto the Throne of England. Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham in his capacity of chief of spies brought in a special agent, Robert Poley, who infiltrated the conspirators, gaining incriminating evidence that he relayed to Walsingham. Ballard confessed more information under torture, others were imprisoned and Babington was hanged at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Babington’s plot finally convinced Elizabeth that Mary was personally active in the conspiracy. Mary was brought to trial in October, 1586, and sentenced on the 25th of that month, but Elizabeth delayed signing the death warrant until the first of February 1587. Mary was executed one week later within the walls of the Tower grounds.

Mary of Guise was the daughter of Claude I, first Duc de Guise, sister to Francoise, the second Duc, and aunt of Henri III, who was Marlowe’s ‘The Guise’.

King Philip of Spain was the widower of Elizabeth’s half sister, ‘Bloody Mary’ from Catharine, wife of Henry VIII, who in her five year rule of England (1553 1558), put to death almost 300 people on charges of heresy. Mary Stuart’s recent execution gave Philip the pretext to prepare for war on England. Sir Francis Walsingham’s agents in Europe were sending him information on the preparation of the ‘Armada’, Spain’s new fleet. Sir Francis’ cousin, Thomas, was a recruiting officer for Francis and he employed Marlowe to go to Rheims. This was late in 1586 or early in 1587 before Marlowe’s coming to London and while finishing his M.A. at CorpusMarloweChristi.was to go to the seminary at Rheims that was also a haven for dissident English Catholics, on the pretext that he was a potential convert. This journey through Paris to Rheims almost cost him the M.A. when he returned but he stated that his trip was not to be construed as a betrayal of his faith.

Howard had been involved in the recent trials of Babington and Queen Mary that were the responsibility of Sir Francis Walsingham. Lord Howard was Queen Elizabeth’s cousin Marlowe had two completed plays with him when he arrived in London from Cambridge. In the summer of 1587 his play, ‘Tamburlaine Part I’, was put into immediate production by the Admiral’s Men, the company for which Marlowe was to write most of his plays. ‘Tamburlaine’ was the saga of a young shepherd who conquered the world and the play needed a charismatic actor to play the title role. A young aspiring actor, Edward Alleyne, two years Marlowe’s junior, became famous for the part and was considered the most magnetic actor of the late Elizabethan period. ‘Tamburlaine’ was staged with such success that Marlowe wrote a sequel prepared from notes that he brought with him from Cambridge. It, too, was a great success and the two Tamburlaines had an immense effect upon the times and the times had greatly influenced the content of the Tamburlaines.

The elements of the two parts of ‘Tamburlaine’ were quickly adopted by other playwrights who became friends of Marlowe. George Peele wrote ‘The Battle of Alcazar, Robert Greene wrote ‘Alphonsus, King of Aragon’ and Thomas Kyd wrote ‘The Spanish Tragedy’. Thomas Nashe had already completed Marlowe’s verse drama, ‘The Tragedy of Dido Queen of Carthage’ written in 1596 at Cambridge. ‘Tamburlaine’ represented the new age of theatre that reflected the new age of England with a world that was no longer flat, chains of ignorance were being snapped, new ideas could be spoken aloud upon the stage and in the streets, knowledge was expanding in every direction, but this new freedom did not apply fully. Some new ideas were being discussed but only among friends in private meetings. A group of men of ideas occasionally came together in argument and exchange of opinion. It was later referred to as ‘The School of Night, but the group was only several ‘free thinkers’ who gathered at the house of Walter Ralegh and who became known as ‘Ralegh’s Men’. The men found interest in discussing scientific experiments, testing new observations and uncovering new ideas A ‘Ralegh’s man’ was Thomas Hariot, and astronomer and mathematician, who with Johannes Kepler demonstrated that the ‘prime mover’, the ‘primus mobile’ could not exist. Another ‘member’ was Christopher Marlowe who was reported by rigid minded people to be ‘shocking’ with his frank logic. Many of the concepts of the old beliefs and of the new were incorporated into Marlowe’s plays, notably ‘Dr Faustus’.

The City of London in 1587 had no theatres within the City walls as it was forbidden for Playhouses be situated within the City. Outside the east walls were the Curtain and the Theatre beyond Bishopsgate where Thomas Watson lived, working as a tutor to William Cornwallis’ son in that year. To be able to perform legally, an acting company had to have the patronage of a nobleman at or above the rank of Baron. One of the first noblemen to give his name to a company was the Queen’s favourite, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, who established respectability for the theatre companies for the first time. ‘Leicester’s Men’, headed by James Burbadge, received Letters Patent in 1574 and two years later Burbadge built ‘the Theatre’ in Shoreditch outside the city’s east wall for ‘Leicester’s Men’ James Burbadge was the father of Richard the actor and of Cuthbert who later managed the company. The Burbadges spelled their name in this manner and Sir Walter Ralegh spelled his name in that manner.

Another company on the scene, the Admiral’s Men, was patronized by the Queen’s cousin, Lord Howard, Lord Admiral of the fleet who would soon face the Spanish Armada. He had been involved in the recent trials of Babington and Queen Mary Stuart.

Only seven years before, Sir Francis Drake had sailed around the southern tip of South America and up the western coast almost to Vancouver Island. On a second trip he crossed the Pacific, around the southern tip of Africa proving beyond all doubt that the world was round, doubts that had lingered in spite of Kopernik and Columbus 100 years before. Back in England Elizabeth knighted him aboard his ship; the Golden Hind. A third voyage to the West Indies included the raiding of the Spanish in Florida and the returning of colonists from Virginia to England. It was Drake who introduced tobacco to England that he brought back from this visit to America in 1585. The Spanish poet playwright, Lope de Vega, who sailed with the Armada, called Drake, ‘Satan himself, the incarnation of the genius of Evil’. In 1595, Queen Elizabeth sent Drake and Hawkins on an expedition against the Spanish in the West Indies. Both men caught dysentery and were buried at sea. Sir Walter Ralegh, too, had roamed the new seas. Some people had believed that Marlowe had written Tamburlaine with Ralegh in mind as Ralegh, too, was a hero like Tamburlaine, but one who was alive among them. He and Drake had caught the imagination of the people, sea captains who were opening the world for England, to adventure, to danger, of course, but also to gold and jewels just over the horizon. The popularity of ‘Tamburlaine’ continued for months to inspire the common man with every performance. Here was something entirely new, a patriotism and enthusiasm from two very young Englishmen. The Marlowe-Alleyne partnerships spread throughout the Inn yards and the common man wanted more of these rousing portrayals of heroes upon the stage with living actors giving thundering speeches. ‘Tamburlaine Parts I and II’ were quickly copied by Marlowe’s playwright friends.

was the English corruptive of his name, Timur Lenk or Timur the Lame. He always offered his enemy the choice of surrendering or being slaughtered by beheading. As many as 30,000 citizens in one city were so slaughtered. He personally piled the severed heads in pyramids like melons in a marketplace as a symbol to others. He captured Syria in 1400, Baghdad again in 1401, and Smyrna in 1402. Reaching the Bosphorus, he defeated the Turkish Ottoman Sultan, Bayezed or ‘Bajazet’ as he is called in the play. He was a greater tactician that Genghis Khan, yet he was illiterate, planning his campaigns motionless and silent over a chessboard. He died quietly in 1405, at the age of 69, somewhere in Asia attempting to conquer China. His war elephants are portrayed in a drawing by Raphael (1483 1520).

Ralegh in the year of 1587, although the Armada of Spain was expected at any time, organized a voyage to colonize the new world in ‘South Carolina’. He appointed the artist, John White as governor, and with 150 people, set sail from Plymouth on the 8th of May. In Thomas Walsingham’s house, 200 years later, were found watercolours of aborigines of the new world, and these were probably painted by John White. Ralegh was the Renaissance man and Marlowe had caught his feelings of the times, adventures into the unknown, exciting new ideas, men of courage and boldness, war and its cruelty, in his ‘Tamburlaine’ that was a resounding success. Both Tamburlaines were printed, the extant versions, in 1590. In history, Tamburlaine was the son of the head of a Mongol tribe and a descendant of Genghis Khan. He was born at Kesh, near Samarkand. In 1387, or 200 years before Marlowe wrote the play, Tamburlaine captured Isphan and Shiraz and attacked Armenia and Georgia. In 1393, he took possession of Baghdad and in 1394, fully captured, Armenia, Georgia, Persia and Mesopotamia.‘Tamburlaine’

George Peele wrote ‘The Battle of Alcazar’ and ‘Menaphon’, Robert Greene wrote ‘Perimedes’, ‘Alphonsus’ and ‘The King of Aragon’ in the next two years. Thomas Kyd wrote ‘The Spanish Tragedy’. Thomas Nashe had already co authored ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage’ with Marlowe at Cambridge.

‘Tamburlaine’ had said it all, that there were new lands to be discovered because the world was no longer flat, chains of ignorance were being snapped, for new ideas could now be spoken aloud and portrayed upon the open stage, and knowledge was expanding in every direction. A group of men of ideas came together in argument and exchange of opinion in what was called the ‘School of Night’ that was also known by the name of ‘Ralegh’s Men’ as Walter Ralegh was said to be the leader of this group who engaged in scientific experiment, the testing of observations, and claiming new ideas. Ralegh was a favourite at Court, who had won a wager with the Queen that he could measure the weight of smoke. One of ‘Ralegh’s Men’ was Thomas Hariot, an astronomer and mathematician who with Johannes Kepler demonstrated that the Prime Mover, or Primum Mobile, could not exist. Another member of the ‘School of Night’ was Marlowe who was reported to be shocking rigid minded people by his frank logic. Many of the concepts of the old beliefs and of the new were incorporated into Marlowe’s plays, notably ‘Doctor Faustus’. Sir Walter Ralegh in that year of 1587, although the Armada was expected at any time, organized a voyage to colonize the new world in South Carolina. He appointed the artist John White as governor and with 150 people they set sail from Plymouth on the 8th of May. In the house of Thomas Walsingham, 200 years later, watercolours of aborigines were found probably painted by John White. Ralegh was the Renaissance man, and Marlowe had caught the temper of the times, adventure into the unknown, with men of courage, boldness, cruelty and war. ‘Tamburlaine’ was a resounding success. Both Tamburlaines were printed, the extant version in 1590. In history, Tamburlaine was the Son o the head of a Mongol tribe and a descendant of Genghis Kahn. He was born at Kesh, n ear Samarkand. In 1387, or 200 years before Marlowe wrote the play. Tamburlaine captured Isphan and Shiraz and he attacked Armenia and Georgia. In 1393, he took possession of Baghdad and in 1394 fully captured Armenia, Georgia, Persia and Mesopotamia. ‘Tamburlaine was the English corruptive of his name, Timur Lenk or Timur the Lame. He always offered his enemy the choice of surrendering or being slaughtered. He personally piled the severed heads in pyramids like melons in a marketplace as a symbol to all others. He captured Syria in 1400, Bagdad again in 1401, Smyrna in 1402. Reaching the Bosphorus, he defeated the Turkish Ottoman Sultan, Bayezed or ‘Bajazet’ as he is called in the play. Timur was a greater tactician than Genghis Khan, yet he was illiterate, planning his campaigns motionless and silent over a chessboard. He died quietly in 1405 at the age of 69 somewhere in Asia attempting to conquer China. His war elephants are portrayed in a drawing by Raphael (1483 1520). During the year 1587, the Rose Theatre was built by Philip Henslowe, a dyer and pawnbroker in his early thirties, and by John Chomley, a grocer. Its site is on Rose Alley south of St. Paul’s on London’s south bank The Rose was enlarged during 1591 1592. It was uncovered during an excavation in 1988 89. The year 1588 was even more momentous for London that was 1587. It was the 100th anniversary of the ascension to the throne of Scotland of Mary’s grandfather James IV. It was the 200th anniversary of a small Scottish invasion of England by nobles under Mary’s direct seventh generation ancestor, Robert II, in retaliation of two English invasions of Scotland. Now, in retaliation to the execution of May Queen of the Scots, the largest invasion force in England’s history was preparing to invade under King Philip of Spain.The year 1588 was more momentous for London than was 1587 as it was the 100th anniversary of the ascension to the throne of Scotland of May’s grandfather James IV and the 200th anniversary of a small Scottish invasion OF England by nobles under Mary’s direct seventh generation ancestor, Robert II, in retaliation of two English invasions into Scotland.

The Armada was to join with the Duke of Parma to escort his troops from Flanders to England to be a terrifying sight to those on the English shore as they rose up from below the horizon. Sir Walter Ralegh had explained that smaller ships, though not as impressive as the 1200 ton Spanish ships, were nimble and more manageable. A 600 ton ship could carry as much ordnance as the ships twice their size and turn broadside twice as fast. Ralegh would not be there for the Armada as he was in the New World.

Due to the excellent navigation and seamanship, England lost no ships in the battle and only 100 sailors. Yet soon after the battle, more men were lost to sickness and neglect in the streets of London than were lost at sea.

Now in retaliation of the execution of Mary Queen of the Scots, the largest invasion force in England’s history was preparing to invade under King Philip of Spain. The Armada amassed 130 ships with 20,000 soldiers and sailors drawn through the sea by the oars of Turkish and Moorish slaves caged below in the galleys, similar to that scene in Marlowe’s ‘Tamburlaine when the Turkish emperor, Bajazet, as a captive in his cage, is drawn through the streets by Moorish slaves. Tamburlaine was a cruel ‘scourge of God’ against the Turks and the Moors. Now the Spanish fleet is in a crusade against Protestant England using the cruel enslavement of Mohammedans.

Marlowe refers to the ‘fiery keel at Antwerp’s bridge’ in his ‘Doctor Faustus’ A fire ship was used in 1585 to destroy the Duke of Parma’s bridge across the Scheldt. Now the Duke was leading Spanish forces in Flanders that were to be picked up by the Armada. The fire ships caused some Spanish ships to cut cables and collide. On Monday, the Armada was engaged at Gravelines that spent much of the Armada’s ammunition. On Wednesday, July 31st, 1588, the main body of English ships slid out from Plymouth at dusk and anchored at Rams Head. In the morning, Lord Howard sent out his personal challenge to the Admiral of the Armada, The Duke of Medina Sidonia. The Spanish were driven past their point of rendezvous with the Duke of Parma. Those armada ships that escaped Howard’s fleet were wrecked of the coast of Ireland. Those aboard were drowned or were killed by the Irish. London rang out with the sound of bells and cheering. Shouts went up around the inn yards and at the theatres, crowds applauded the thundering speeches of ‘Tamburlaine’. Processions then continued into the nights by the light of bonfires. On November 24th, Elizabeth in her coach with its golden crown canopy rode all along Fleet Street and up Ludgate Hill to the west door of St Paul’s Cathedral. Of the sad and dreadful notes of 1588, on September 4th, the Queen’s favourite, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester died. A patron of an acting company, he had provided the beginning opportunities for Marlowe, his contemporaries and those other playwrights to come.

On board the Armada were 600 monks, priests and chaplains who before battle chanted the prayer, “Our Lord give us victory over the enemies of His faith”. To be assured of that victory on board were 2630 great ordnance, the heavy cannons.

Marlowe’s patron of the ‘Admiral’s Men’, Lord Howard, the Admiral of the Fleet, arrived at Plymouth on May 23rd with the main body of the Queen’s ships to join his officers with the remainder of the fleet. John Hawkins, the rear admiral in command of the Victory, had already engaged an attack off the coast of Veracruz and had gained valuable information of the Armada by pretending to betray Elizabeth. As comptroller of the nav y, he increased its size and made improvements in construction and rigging. He died in 1595.

Fleet navigators urged Lord Howard to attack the Spanish in their own waters, but the weather delayed the attack. On Sunday, the 28th of July, Lord Howard ordered eight fire ships to spread among the Armada when it was anchored near the Scilly Isles off the coast of France.

Mary of Guise, mother of Mary queen of the Scots, was the daughter of Claude I, first Duc de Guise, son of Rene II, Duc de Lorraine, and married to Antoinette Bourbon of the powerful French family. Henry IV (1580-1610) was the first ruler of the House of Bourbon. Claude I fought against the Holy Roman Empire and the Anabaptists. His son, Francois, 2nd Duc de Guise, Mary’s brother and uncle to Queen Mary of the Scots, controlled the government of the young King Francis II along with his brother, Charles of Lorraine, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Rheims and Cardinal of Lorraine.

The astrologer, Simon Forman, wrote in his 1588 diary, “It was the beginning of much sorrow and strife. I began to practice necromancy and to all angels and spirits”.

When the brothers were ousted from power by Catherine de Medici, they caused a civil war by their massacre of the Huguenots at Wassy in 1562 where Francois was assassinated. His son, Henri of Lorraine, 3rd Duc de Guise, took up the struggle against the Huguenots to avenge his father’s assassination. During the Bartholomew’s Day massacre, 1572, dramatized in Marlowe’s play ‘Massacre at Paris’, he personally supervised the murder of Coligny whom he believed to be the chief instigator of his father’s murder. After the peace of 1576, he formed an alliance of Catholic nobles, the Holy League, to resume the war against the Huguenots. Henry III disbanded it but it was revived in 1584 when the Huguenot, Henry of Navarre, was assigned to the throne as Henry IV. The Duc de Guise gained prestige and led the people of Paris in insurrection called the Day of Barricades on May 12th, 1588. The English fleet was readying to sail on May 23rd. The Duc de Guise had the chance to become king himself but he let the King escape the mob. One month later, in June, the king appointed the Duc his Lieutenant General of the Royal armies, but in July or August, the Duc was assassinated by the King’s Guard. These events occurred at the time of the Armada, late July and August, when Marlowe was writing the history of the man who was still active in cruelty at Paris. The news of the Duc’s murder would make Marlowe’s play, ’The Guise’ or ‘Massacre at Paris’, as immediately topical as the Armada victory had made ‘Tamburlaine’, both plays appearing at the same time, in the summer and fall of 1588.

Lord Howard complained in a letter to William Cecil, Lord Burlegh, nine days after the Admiral has engaged the Armada, “It is a pitiful sight to see, here at Margate, how the men die in the streets having no place to receive them into here, it would grieve any man’s heart to see them that served so valiantly to die so miserable.”

The Queen’s court records of 1588 show performances by the Lord Admiral’s men appearing at court in honour of the company’s patron who had defended England against the Armada that summer. One play was the timely ‘Tamburlaine’ and the other was ‘The Massacre at Paris’. London’s popular actor, Ned Alleyne had the enviable role of the just murdered Duc de Guise. In the same year the playgoers were clamouring for more plays after the extraordinary success of ‘Tamburlaine’ The German ‘Faustbuch’ had appeared that year and Marlowe took advantage of it to write ‘Doctor Faustus’.

The concept of a man selling his soul to the Devil suggested great stage melodrama, particularly when Marlowe wrote his main character with his actor friend in mind. He knew that Ned would revel in his power to stir the crowd with the words that he gave him. Marlowe was encouraged to write a second part for Doctor Faustus and to re write the entire play.

Many men passed them by daily whether their hearts grieved or not. As one keenly interested in the Royal Court of Scotland, Marlowe would have contrasted in his mind the conditions at Margate with the manner in which men of battle would be honoured at the Scottish Court. After Tamburlaine’ and the Armada, Marlowe never in a play glorified war again.

This was after an English translation of ‘Faustbuch’ appeared in England in 1592, by ‘P, F., Gent.’ The gentleman, ‘P. F.’, has not been identified. The original ‘Historia von D. John Fausten’ published by an anonymous Lutheran in Frankfurt in 1587 was given the English title of ‘The Historie of the damnable life and deserved death of Doctor John Faustus, imprinted by Thomas Orwin and to be sold by Edward White, dwelling at the little North doore of Paules, at the signe of the Gun, 1592’. The details in the book lent themselves to the Marlowe manner. It provided the opportunity to highlight black magic and witchcraft on stage that was immensely popular. The concept of a man selling his soul to the devil suggested great stage melodrama, particularly when Marlowe wrote his main character with his actor friend in mind. He knew how to utilize the tall, deep voiced actor, Ned Alleyne. He knew that Ned would revel in his power to stir the crowds with the words that he gave him. ‘Doctor Faustus’, the play, was printed in 1604, the first extant edition. Two hundred years later, Wolfgang von Goethe wrote his ‘Doctor Faustus’ in 1808. The two eras are reflected in the two versions. Marlowe’s Mephistopheles is gloomy, one who can’t forget his former glory and Goethe’s Mephistopheles is jovial, a man who fully enjoys his work. In the London of 1589, the fortunes of England, Elizabeth, and Ralegh reversed. The Armada defeat redirected power from Spain to England to rule the seas. Elizabeth’s popularity quickly waned because of the expenditures and abuses of Royal power and particularly from her being stingy with food for the army at Plymouth, the scandal of negligence in any care for those who returned from the Armada battle and the decrepit conditions permitted for the wounded in Margate. At Court, she demoted Ralegh and took Devereux as her favourite. Ralegh, no longer Captain of the Queen’s Guard, left the Court. In that same year, he encouraged Edmund Spenser to come to London from Ireland to publish the first of three books of his ‘The Faerie Queene’, several lines of which Marlowe had incorporated into the ‘Tamburlaine’ plays when they were printed the following year of 1590. Marlowe turned to entirely new subjects for his plays. From world events, he concentrated on the individual and concerned himself with delving into the mind of a man or a woman more intimately. His themes were no longer ‘Sturm und Drang’, great show and bombast, as his characters were more human if not humane He began work on at least three plays, ‘The Jew of Malta’, ‘Arden of Faversham’ and ‘Macbeth’. He used as models the scenes and the people familiar to him. In his one completed play of 1589, ‘The Jew of Malta’, the daughter is an appealing human being much like his sister Margaret, compared to the élan of Zenocrate in ‘Tamburlaine’. The humour in the play is very much of the humour of his friend Thomas Watson. The countryside scene is the familiar Canterbury where he lived as a boy, a landscape that is also present in ‘Arden of Faversham’. Three years later in 1592, the listings at the Rose Theatre for the month of February show that ‘The Jew of Malta’ brought in more money than the previous six plays by other writers. Playing on a ‘Saturday night, it took in three times the amount that the play made on the previous Saturday Night, 50s to 17s 3d. The earliest surviving edition of the play, the 1633 Quarto begins, “This play, composed by so worthy an author as Master Marlowe and the part of the Jew by so inimitable an actor as Master Alleyne”.

The reality of being a playwright as a livelihood was becoming apparent to Marlowe. Playwriting was demanding and hard slogging when there were no royalties as plays were sold to the companies and each had to be a commercial success for an author to be asked to write more. Marlowe found for subjects of his plays the events and the people around him, in intrigues of the courts of Paris and London. He now broadened his interest to the Court of James VI of Scotland.

There is a common theme through his plays ‘Macbeth’, ‘Massacre at Paris, and ‘Arden of Faversham’. Present in all three, and not to be found elsewhere, is the designing woman. In ‘Massacre at Paris’ the designing woman is Catharine, the Queen Mother of France’s Charles who says, “Come, Mother, let us go to honor this solemnity”, to which the Queen adds the aside, “Which I’ll dissolve with blood and cruelty”. In Marlowe’s ‘Arden of Faversham’, the designing woman is Alice Arden who incites others to murder her husband so that she may marry her lover, Mosbie. Mary |Queen of the Scots, in letters and in sonnets written to her lover, James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, had instigated the idea of having her husband, Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, killed, a parallel to Alice Arden. In the play ‘Macbeth’, Lady Macbeth incites her husband to murder the Scottish King, resulting further in the murder of Banquo whose sons become heirs to the throne from childless Macbeth, paralleling Elizabeth’s sentencing of Mary to death, whose son, James, becomes heir to England’s throne from childless Elizabeth. The new element in these plays, the remorse or guilt felt by these cruel women for their deeds is original with Marlowe. The main source of material for Macbeth is the Holinshed Chronicles which make little mention of Lady Macbeth and none at all of remorse. Yet, the speeches of the two women take the same transformation. “A little water clears us of this deed.” “Here’s the smell of blood still.” (Lady Macbeth) “And, Susan, fetch water and wash away this blood But with my nails I scrape away the blood. The more I strive, the more the blood appears. In vain we strive for here his blood remains.” (Alice Arden)

In the Holinshed Chronicles where Marlowe also found the basis for his Edward II and Macbeth, Holinshed relates the killing of Duff by Donwald whose wife encourages him to murder but nothing is said of any remorse. The Chronicles states: “A mysterious voice chastised him [Donwald]”. The king with his voice being stricken into the great dread and terror, passed the night without “anie sleepe coming to his eies”. In Macbeth this becomes: “Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more’”. Macbeth and Arden are similar in this theme of the woman’s remorse after encouraging murder for selfish desires with no basis for it in the Chronicles.

In ‘Macbeth’ there is an attempt to please James VI of Scotland as his ancestor, Banquo, is not involved in the real model of the play, the murder of Duff by Donald. Further, the play’s purpose is to establish the right of Banquo’s heir, James, to the throne of England taking the place of the one who had no heirs, Elizabeth, who had put to death his mother, Mary, who parallels the murdered Banquo. Elizabeth’s ‘remorse’ can be implied for her treatment of her subjects, soldiers and sailors during her last days on the throne. Her policies became weak, her loyalties vacillated with Ralegh and others; she abused her royal power, she chose less able ministers than were Cecil, Lord Burlegh and Walsingham who dies in 1590.

A revolt in Ireland led by Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, prompted her to choose the second Earl of Essex to lead an army against Tyrone that he did successfully, but when he returned, Essex led a revolt against Elizabeth and was executed for it in 1601.

Marlowe’s friend and fellow playwright, Thomas Kyd, had written that Marlowe had made known his desire to go to Scotland for there a poet received honour from a King who was a patron of Poets and Playwrights. King James of Scotland was a descendant of Banquo ( yes, the man in ‘Macbeth’) as his mother was Mary Queen of the Scots, not yet two years in her grave.

The normal method of execution for traitors was hanging, drawing and quartering. The site of public handing was Tyburn near today’s Marble Arch. Marlowe made additions to several plays after Newgate: ‘The Jew of Malta’, ‘The Massacre at Paris’, ‘Edward II’, and ‘Doctor Faustus’.

When Elizabeth died in March 1603, Banquo’s seed, James, came to the English throne. “Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown.”

In Marlowe’s ‘Edward II’, Queen Isabella is an inciter, too, of one person against another though not for murder, but even here her envy is rewarded by her son disowning her. Why was this theme repeated so consistently from 1589 on ? Marlowe’s experience during that September may have a bearing as the trauma and violence that he experienced in his life that afternoon of September 18 was as dramatic as any scene in his plays.

This new aspect in the women of Marlowe’s plays is not present in previous women. Joan of Arc, in ‘Henry VI Part I’ that is a later version of Marlowe’s ‘Harry vj’, is a different Joan than the Joan in the Holinshed Chronicles. She calls on evil spirits and says to her English captors “A plaguing mischief light on Charles and thee and may ye both be suddenly surpris’d by bloody hands in sleeping on your beds.” “A pox on both your houses.”

At 2:30 in the afternoon when Marlowe is walking alone along Hog Lane in the district of Norton Folgate up the wide road from Bishop’s Gate, he sees a man whom he does not know and so he takes no further notice of him but the man approaches and draws his sword and attacks Marlowe.The man is William Bradley, the son of an innkeeper of Gray’s Inn Lane, Holborn, who happens to owe a debt of 14 pounds to another innkeeper, John Alleyne, who is the brother of Ned Alleyne, Marlowe’s leading actor. John Alleyne’s lawyer is Hugo Swift who happens to be Tom Watson’s brother in law. Previously, Swift, on Alleyne’s behalf, had given Bradley notice that he would file suit against him in the Court of common pleas and Bradley’s friend George Orrell had threatened Swift with physical violence if he did so. Calling his bluff, Alleyne, Swift and his brother in law, Tom Watson, had taken Bradley to court and Bradley answered with a counter petition. Now, at 2:30 on this September afternoon, Bradley is approaching Marlowe, who is a friend of both Tom Watson and John Alleyne’s brother and upon that distant relationship, Bradley attacks Marlowe with his drawn sword.

It is at this point that it is realized that in 1589, gentlemen walked the streets of London with a sword at their side. Marlowe is now in the action of fighting off Bradley with his sword in this unexpected and unprovoked assault when Tom Watson appears and intervenes in the swordfight and Watson kills Bradley. Even though the witnesses that now have gathered all claimed that they heard Bradley cry out at Marlowe’s approach, “Arte thouwe nowe come ? Then I will have a boute with thee”, both Watson and Marlowe are promptly arrested on suspicion of murder and thrown into Newgate Prison. When Marlowe is allowed bail on October 1st, a Richard Kytchine and Humphrey Rowland stood bail at 20 pounds and Marlowe is bound over for 40 pounds. His fourteen days in Newgate prison changed Marlowe forever. Luke Hutton wrote in his “The Black Dogge of Newgate”, published 1600: “A rat doth rob the candle from my hands and then a hundred rats all sallie forth. While thus I lay in irons under ground, I heard a man that begged for releese; And in a chaine of iron was he bound, begging one penny to buie a hundred bread Hungered and stervd, for want of food he lay dead.”

VI Part III’ resembles an earlier play, ‘The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York’ which was performed by Pembroke’s Men for whom Marlowe had written ‘Edward II’.

Friends meeting at the house of Walter Ralegh, now dubbed ‘The School of Night’, discussed both scientific experiments and mysticism. It was a beginning of entertaining concepts of the Universe that were shaking the long held beliefs of more than 1600 years. Kopernik had put forward the concept that the sun was at the centre of this solar system 100 years before in 1505 and this was in opposition to the long-held and accepted system stated by Ptolemy that the Earth was the centre of the Universe.

“Now, Faustus, let thine eyes with horror stare Into that vast perpetual torture house. There are the furies tossing damned souls on burning forks.”

Note that all of the above dates of performances of these plays are before 1593 ! This means that all of the plays referred to and named were inscribed before the name of ‘William Shake speare’ was even written into the ‘Registrar’s Book for the first time in the fall of 1593 meaning that none of these named plays were from a pen of a ‘William Shake speare’. All play titles, then, were written by Christopher Marlowe or by his fellow playwrights.

Christopher Marlowe’s play, ‘Harey vj’ was a popular production for Philip Henslowe at the Rose Theatre, along with “Massacre at Paris’, ‘The Jew of Malta’ and both ‘Tamburlaines’. Henslowe’s diary records three performances of ‘Harey vj’ on the 3rd, 7th, and 11th of March 1591. This listing is now blithely referred to as “The first record of a performance of a Shakespeare play, Henry VI Part I”. It is the Lord Strange’s company that is listed at the top of the page. Thomas Nashe referred to a performance of the play in his ‘Pierce Pennilesse’. The performances were the first presented by the merged company of Lord Strange his servants and the Admiral’s Men. ‘Massacre’ was still popular having ten performances in five months when the theatres reopened after the plague in 1593. They also presented Thomas Kyd’s ‘Jeronymo’. By May of 1592, the ‘Tamburlaines’ had been included in the repertoire. On the same sheet of the diary as ‘Harey vj’, two performances of Marlowe’s ‘The Jew of Malta’ are listed as being performed on February 26 and March 10, 1591. A different play was performed each and every day. Performances are recorded on the page for February 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, March 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12. A play is listed for February 29 in the year ‘1591’ that is not a leap year. However, the year is only now called 1591 but at the time the year 1591 began in March and so that February 29 was still in the year 1590 which only then was a leap year. Also listed in the merged Admiral’s Strange’s company was a play ‘Titus’. There was an earlier play, ‘Titus and Vespacia’, or did it refer to ‘Titus Andronicus’ ? In 1594 at the beginning of the year, the Rose had the Earl of Sussex’s Men performing ‘The Jew of Malta’ and “Titus Ondronicus’. In a 1592 list, the Rose showed that ‘The Taner of Denmarke’ was staged on the 23rd of‘HenryMay.

“This usage makes my misery increase. But can my air of life continue long, When all my senses are annoy’d with stench ? Within a dungeon England’s King is kept, Where I am starv’d for want of sustenance.” (Edward II) On December 3, Marlowe at the assizes stood before Judge Sir Roger Manwood and was released. When Manwood died, Marlowe wrote an epitaph for him in Latin in 1592.

Faustus: But is there no coeluim igneum et crystal lunum ?

Only now were Copernican ideas being examined and talked about among the friends of Ralegh along with other concepts that were in violation to the dogmas of the Church of Rome and of the Church of England that both claimed Ptolemy’s to be the accepted vision. Galileo had not yet looked through the telescope that he was assembling and that would not occur until 1609.

“Duke: This makes me wonder more than all the rest, at this time of year, when every tree is barren of his fruit, from whence you had these ripe grapes.

A member of Ralegh’s free thinkers was Thomas Hariot who was to calculate with Kepler that there could not be a ‘primum mobile’ or ‘prime mover’ as the current belief of the Church stated for ‘the supreme being’. Hariot calculated the speeds of the Sun and the Moon and found that the ‘prime mover’ would have to turn at an incredible speed, Kepler estimating that it would travel at seven and a half million miles in a ‘twin pulse beat’ and therefore could not exist. Ralegh in his ‘History’ denied the existence of the ‘prime mover’. Marlowe was reported to have said that ‘Moses was a mere juggler’ and ‘that one Hariot, being Sir W. Ralegh’s man, can do more than he’, Moses. This was heresy. Hariot worked on symbols in algebra and calculated the chronology of the Old Testament. Studying the time taken for the civilizations to rise and fall, he concluded that the Old Testament did not allow enough time. He was accused of denying the ‘Word of God’. These discussions are included in Marlowe’s ‘Dr Faustus’.

“Faustus: How many heavens or spheres are there ?

Mephisto: Nine, the seven planets, the firmament, and the empirical heaven.

Faust: Please it Your Grace, the year is divided into two circles over the whole world, so that when it is winter with us in the contrary circle, it is likewise summer to them as in India, Saba and such countries that lie East, where they have fruit twice a year, from whence, by means of a swift spirit that I have, I have these grapes brought to me as you see.”

The ‘swift spirit’ suggests some ‘magic’ or that which is unknown or not understood. Magic or mysticism was the other interest of the ‘School of Night’. Another Englishman that inspired ideas and conversations was John Dee, who made experiments but who was feared by the superstitious as a ‘sorcerer’. He was both a scientist and a magus and was, in part, the model for ‘Dr Faustus’ and for Prospero in ‘The Tempest’. Dr John Dee’s library of rare books at Mortlake was burned by a frightened crowd of the superstitious because, like Faustus, he was considered to deserve punishment. John Aubrey writes of Hariot in his ’Brief Life.

The Church of Rome at its inception had adopted the Ptolemy concept as opposed to the writings of earlier astrologers who had already claimed that the Sun was at the centre of the Solar System and that the Earth rotated around the Sun. The Church of Rome chose Ptolemy’s concept as it preferred to believe that the Earth was central.

Galileo was experimenting in 1589 to 1591 with ‘gravity’ and ‘velocity’. On the Continent Tycho Brahe and Johan Kepler were still pouring over notes of Kopernik but their published works were still a decade into the future. Brahe was at work on Astronomy and Kepler would lay the basis for Newton’s principles in another 100 years.

Sir Francis Drake had proven that the earth was spherical against the common belief as dictated by the Church but in the days of Christobal Colon, a hundred years before, there were spherical globes present and it did not take Columbus to prove that the Earth was spherical. Yet, the idea of a spherical Earth was not totally believed by all who remained convinced by their church priest and so the ‘new’ concept was still a dangerous idea and those who spoke of it were suspect of being heretics. It was a lesson put forth in ‘Dr Faustus’.

Mephisto: No, Faustus, they be but fables.”

Turning to Astrology as practiced by John Hariot, at least under the Sun sign, a search for similarity between these two men in each of these sun signs indicates the number and identity of the literary giants in each of these signs in Poetry, Drama and Novels.

The general public feared mysticism and science, neither of which they understood. Superstition can be seen as the interpretation of what they thought was possible or what they had heard was possible. In a 1589 woodcut at Helmsford, Essex, there is depicted three women hanging from a wooden form while nearby another woman sits with a ferret on her lap with its face to hers, while toads and other animals wander about The title imprinted reads: “Joan Prentis and hir bid”. Women were tried by jury and hanged for mischief, including ‘murder through witchcraft’. Illegitimate children gave evidence against their grandmothers, to whom satanic spirits had spoken though familiars, which are animals that speak. ‘Macbeth’ makes great use of the crowd’s fascination with spirits, witchcraft in their own perception of magic. The second witch says ‘Paddock calls’. Paddock is a toad.

Who wrote the Plays ? It is certain that the money lender, William Shaxper, who lived on the main street of the little town of Stratford was never known to have written a letter or to have owned a book. No one ever visited the town to call on any of his many relatives. It was as if they never wanted to be assured of the truth for then the biographers would have no one to adulate.

Taurus is not particularly a creative sign as are Gemini, Sagittarius or Aquarius as those under Taurus and other non creative signs tend more to the temperament that is better engaged in fixed entities, mathematics, banking and finance, applied science and the law. The man of Stratford, William Shacksper, although not greatly able to read or to write, was a true Taurus He was a successful dealer in grains and an astute lender of monies fully attested to in letters found at Stratford. He stood awaiting his customers on the London east corner outside the building where cattle stock were sold. He loaned out money to his customers at ‘ten in a hundred’. Also at that street corner just outside the cattle stock market stood the wooden ‘stocks’ to hold fast the arms and legs of ‘ne’er do wells’ at the present site of the London Stock market

Of the poets and novelists who are of first rank and who were born under Taurus before 1900 number only three. They are all Londoners, Anthony Trollope, April 24, Robert Browning; May 7 and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, May 12. Machiavelli, May 4 and Kirkegaard, May 6, are also of Taurus but were of differing writing disciplines. Those born under the creative sun sign of Aquarius before 1900 are considerably more numerous. They include Francis Bacon, Lord Byron, and August Strindberg, January 22; Marie Henri Beyle (Stendhal), January 23; Pierre Beaumarchais, January 24; Robert Burns, Somerset Maughm and Virginia Woolf, January 25; Lewis Carroll, January 27; Anton Chekhov, January 29; James Joyce, February 2; Gertrude Stein, February 3; Christopher Marlowe, February 6; Charles Dickens and Sinclair Lewis, February 7; John Ruskin and Jules Verne, February 8; Amy Lowell, February 9; Charles Lamb and Bertolt Brecht, February 10; and George Meredith, February 1. To Londoners, Charles Dickens is ever more popular than ‘Shakespeare’ and it is noteworthy that Christopher Marlowe’s birth date is the 6th while Dickens’ is the 7th of February.

Christopher Marlowe was born on February 6, 1564. He was an Aquarian. William of Stratford was born presumably on April 23, 1564. He was a Taurus.

* * * * * * *

“Mr Hariot went with Sir Walter Ralegh into Virginia, and has writ the Description of Virginia which is printed. Dr Pell tells me that he finds amongst his papers, an Alphabet that he contrived for the American language, like Devills…”

There was no one in London or in all England whose name was ‘William Shake speare’ as that name was never entered into the official town records as having been born, with no wedding announcement and the name never appeared in the ‘Burial Register’ of any town or church in the country. This should have been recognized long before any book was published under that name in 1623.Several names have been forwarded as to who could logically be the Author, Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere and even Chris Marlowe.

During the 1780s, the Reverend James Wilmot was the first person to make an earnest effort to walk out of his doorway and to go to Warwickshire to gather any information in order to write a biography. He searched every private bookcase within 50 miles and found nothing. He finally burned the notes that he had written and later confessed in confidence to a friend that he had to admit to himself that there was no evidence of anyone in that district who could ever have written the ‘great works’. His confessed ‘shame’ was tightly held as it never became known that he had suggested that ‘another person’, ‘possibly Sir Francis Bacon’ was the author until 1932.

Those who did not believe that the Stratford man was the Author increased but their suggested author was Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford who lived from1550 to 1604 and this seemed to be a drawback as the ‘Shake speare’ name was known only from 1593 and this limited the time to write 37 Plays by 1604 and this seemed most unlikely. Said a Princeton Professor Gerald E. Bently, “The large majority of all English plays before the reign of Elizabeth are anonymous and even from 1558 to 1590 the authors of most plays are unknown”. When the Plays were printed there was no name of the author on them and when the name appeared on only a few, some appeared on plays that are now known not to be of ‘Shake speare’ indicating that the publishers and printers did not know who wrote them. The authors Earl of Surrey and Sir Philip Sidney published their works without a name while they lived.

Oxford’s father in law was the Lord Treasurer, chief counselor to Queen Elizabeth, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was Oxford’s guardian prior to becoming is father-in-law. So Cecil, his daughter and the Queen were protected from anything that Oxford wrote in the pen name.

Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, when he died, received more dedications from his many fellows than anyone else whereas ‘Shake speare’ received no dedications.

The mythological Patron of the Theatre arts, Pallas Athena, wore a helmet that when the visor was drawn, made her invisible. She carried in her hand a great spear so she was known as the ‘the spear shaker’. Oxford’s crest was ‘an English lion shaking a broken lance’ so if he chose the broken name ‘shake speare’ broken by the hyphen, he was hinting that it was his name, the ‘spear shaker’. Did Ben Jonson know this when he wrote into the 1623 First folio, “He seems to shake a Lance As brandish’t at the eyes of Ignorance’. The use of ‘pen names’ guarded writers from retribution by those who may take offense from what the author had written.

In 1858, a woman went to England to meet the most well respected poet and to tell him flatly that he and the world were wrong about the great Author who she said was most probably Sir Francis Bacon. The visitor, Delia Bacon, an American and no relation, was quickly shown to the door. She had written a book on the subject in 1857. Well known authors had supported Delia Bacon. Nathaniel Hawthorne had written an introduction to her book and in an article in the Atlantic magazine of 1863 he praised her conviction but not her concluded author. None other than Mark Twain admitted that his disbelief in Shakespeare being the author “was born of Delia Bacon’s book”.

The ‘DEDICATION’ that is printed above “Inserted in The Folio of 1632” are above “To the most Noble and Inseparable Pair of Brethren, William Earl of Pembroke, &c. And Philip Earl of Montgomery…our singular good lords”. It is assumed that this ‘Dedication’ was to honour the two men who financed the 1632 Folio. Of more significant interest is that at that time Philip was married to Susan De Vere, who was De Vere’s daughter. His brother, William Earl of Pembroke was the King’s Lord Chamberlain who was the court official who controlled the performance and publication of plays in England. It is obvious that the entire ‘Dedication’ and ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ prefacing the 1632 Folio were written by Ben Jonson as they are written with the finest detail of the correct manner to address the two brothers and Pembroke was also a patron of Jonson and he had ‘arranged’ for an increase in Jonson’s pension. Yet De Vere died in 1604 and, in the seven years previous from the fall of 1593, twelve of the Plays were published for the first time, eight of which carried the name ‘Shake speare’ for the first time, five in 1600. However, the publication of the Plays came to an abrupt end after 1604 which seems to eliminate De Vere as the author of those recognized as ‘Shakespeare’ after 1604, but it also is a further reason to eliminate ‘Shaxper’ as author as if it needed any further documentation.

The way in which the ‘Plays’ were dated as 1605 and later seems to exclude Oxford as Author but there is the argument that whoever dated them was under the illusion that the man from Stratford wrote them but there is also no evidence that they were written before 1604 when Oxford died. Then there is the mystery of ‘Hamlet’. The ‘life’ of Hamlet has remarkable similarities to the life of Edward de Vere as Oxford had two cousins in the military, both Francis and Horace De Vere and early in the play there appears ‘Francisco the soldier’ and Hamlet’s friend ‘Horatio’. Then there is De Vere’s father-inlaw, Lord Burghley who was also known by the nickname ‘Polus’ a name similar to Polonius and another similarity is that Polonius had a daughter as Lord Burghley had a daughter, Anne who De Vere married. Add to this another oddity, that Edward De Vere was abducted by pirates while on a sea voyage as was ‘Hamlet’ The “mouse trap” that Hamlet asks the players to perform, was originally written by Christopher Marlowe. In the ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’, the similarities abound when a romantic interlude involving the ‘merry wife’, Anne Page, so parallels the marriage negotiations between De Vere, Ann Cecil and her, at the time, prospective husband Sir Philip Sidney that the pensions and the dowries mentioned in the play match those in the situation of De Vere and his wife, Anne.

The book of ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, was published without the “author’s permission” in 1609 and in the same year a preface to ‘Troilus and Cressida’ read strangely, ‘A never Writer, to an Ever reader. News”. Was this cryptic note signifying that the manuscripts of the Plays were held by the unnamed ‘grand possessors’ who were the “Incomparable pair of brethren” as stated in the Folio’s ‘Dedication’, William Earl of Pembroke and his brother Philip, Earl of Montgomer y” who was Oxford’s son in law, having married his daughter Susan. In his book, Palladis Tamia of 1598, Francis Meres wrote that “the best for comedy among us be Edward Earl of Oxford”.Theplays, ‘A Yorkshire Tragedy’ (1608) and ‘The London Prodigal’ (1605) were both published with the name ‘Shakespeare’ on them but both were after 1604 when Edward de Vere died. Why was the author referred to as “ever-living” if he were alive ? Why in Sonnet 76 does it say “That every word doth almost tell my name, Showing their birth, and where they did proceed” ?

There would seem to be no more legitimate source of which plays were considered to be credits to the name ‘Shake speare’ than the official Stationer’s Register at the office in London as the name of the play and the author had to be so registered to legally publish a book but the Stationer’s Register reveals that entered therein are seven plays under the name ‘Shake speare’ that are now lost, or perhaps ascribed to other authors. These seven include ‘The History of King Stephen’, ‘A Yorkshire Tragedy’ and ‘The Merry Devil of Edmonton’. Added to those are six plays that were published for the first time in the ‘Third Folio of 1663’, including ‘Pericles’.

From the beginning of his first play, Marlowe is recognized as having ‘developed’ use of ‘blank verse’ and most of the play writers were influenced by his first plays using ‘pentameter’, “A line of verse consisting of five metrical feet”. These lines are described as ‘natural speech’. Each line is composed usually of ten syllables, the stress placed on every other syllable and the lines do not rhyme.

In the Folio of 1623, eighteen ‘new’ plays were published for the first time in any form, and this is an additional mystery. Where has this other half of the ‘36’ Shakespeare canon been sequestered and by whom, and there is also the additional question of who did compose them.

Shakespeare”.Columbia

The Hamlet story originates in Belleforest’s ‘Histoire Tragiques’ for which a translation from the French into English did not exist at the writing of the Play as ‘Othello’ was from a story in G. Giraldi Cinthio’s ‘Hecatommithi”, also not translated from Italian at the time of writing. ‘A Yorkshire Tragedy’ and several other plays were claimed to be by Shakespeare but were not by that name and this same situation was never experienced by Beaumont, Fletcher or b y Ben Jonson.“TheCase for Christopher Marlowe” cannot be positively proven, yet there are many positives that could support the supposition that Marlowe was the Author of the Plays. Marlowe was well versed in the languages of these untranslated works.

Frances Meres’ book in 1598 claimed that one of the comedies was ‘Love’s Labore’s Wonne’.

Early catalogues of some booksellers in London attributed to ‘Shake speare’ ‘Edward II’, Edward III’ and ‘Edward IV’. A volume called ‘Shakespeare Vol. 1’, owned by King Charles II and discovered in his library, was found to contain with other plays ‘Mucedorus’ and ‘Fair Em’, for a total of 18 more plays to the ‘37’ in the printed plays in today’s editions as ‘Pericles, Prince of Tyre’ is now included. No one in history has written 55 plays so dependant upon history. Many of the Plays had older originals that were written in a continental European language. ‘The Comedy of Errors’ is from a play by Plautus and was written before a translation was published in England. ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ alludes to a 1578 visit by Marguerite de Valois to the Court of Henry Navarre and in the English play the names of the French courtiers are used without change. ‘Othello’ is from a story by G. Giraldi Cinthio and this story was not yet translated from the French when the English play was written. The ‘Hamlet’ story originated in Belleforest’s ‘Histoire Tragiques’, a book that had not been translated from the French before ‘Hamlet’ was written. The writer, George Steevens, wrote in the nineteenth century of a section of ‘Titus Andronicus’: “This passage alone wold sufficiently convince me that the play before us was the work of one who was conversant with the Greek tragedies in their original language. We have here a plain allusion to the Ajax of Sophocles, of which no translation was extent at the time of

University’s Gilbert Highet wrote that “We can be sure that Shakespeare had not read Aeschylus, yet what can we say when we find some of Aeschylus’ thoughts appearing in Shakespeare’s plays ?”.

In 1593, Whitsun eve occurred on June 2nd but Marlowe was buried on June 1st ! As is usual with forgeries of the 19th century the artistic forger forgets the obvious, in this he forgot a leap year or he never visited the Deptford church files. This is claimed to be written by ‘Richard Bome’ but it is signed by ‘Richard Baine’. Another copy of this ‘Note’ bought from ‘Mr. Baker’ contains all manner of criminal offences of Marlowe, sixteen in number and most of a repulsion of religion. The final accusation reads… ‘That one Richard Cholmelei hath confessed that he was perswaded by Marlowe reason to become an Aatheiste’. The Note is signed ‘Rychard Baine’ and under the signature is ‘Coppye of Marloes blansphemyes as sent to her H…” If the ‘H’ is to mean ‘Highness’ then the author is unaware that Henry VIII officially changed the ‘Highness’ to ‘Majesty’.Itisrecorded that on the 18th of May 1593, a warrant was issued to Henry Maunder who was one of the Queen’s messengers ‘to repair to the house of Mr. Thomas Walsingham, in Kent, or to any other place where he shall understand Christofer Marlow to be remaining, and by virtue thereof to apprehend and bring him to Court in his company”. Marlowe at that time was staying with his friend Thomas Walsingham at his friend’s estate at Scadbury, Chislehurst south of Greenwich at the time when plague was rampant in London.

If Marlowe wrote most of the plays that at one time or another were considered to be written by ‘Shake speare’, he would need to be out of London, possibly in Scotland as he had confided to a fellow “as the King of Scotland appreciates the literature of the stage”.

The 19th century is well documented as a time of forgeries by J.P, Collier and W.H. Ireland who had ‘discovered’ manuscripts proving many activities of one ‘William Shake speare’ most of which were still being related as true by 20th century biographers. The one original draft is known as ‘A NOTE’ that says ‘Contayninge the opinion of one Christofer Marly, concernynge his damnable opinions and judgement of religion and scorne of Gods worde’. The ‘Note’ contains many alterations and words struck through and with one excision substituted with: “A Note delivered on Whitsun eve last of the most horrible blasphemes uttereyd by Christofer Marley who within 111 dayes after came to a soden and fearfull end of his life”

The Privy Council records show that two days later, on May 20th, “Christofer Marley of London, gentleman, being sent for by warrant from their Lordships, hath entered his appearance accordingly for his indemnity herein, and is commanded to give his daily attendance on their Lordships until he shall be licensed to the contrary”. All seems to be well, Marlowe has obeyed the order, but there is no further document to show if he was charged with any misdemeanour and what was that charge. Further, what could be the charge that would allow him to report on a daily basis.

For Marlowe to be in Scotland is considered an impossibility as all London knew that he was stabbed to death on May 30th in the year 1593 and was buried on June 1st in the St Nicholas churchyard at Deptford several miles west of Greenwich. If anyone cared to visit the village, they could look at the burial register at the church. Few if any bothered to go there as the country was quickly being filled with vile gossip of his being a heathen, who had made outlandish statements about the Holy Book. The only ‘proof’ of such statements are two manuscripts that are steeped in mystery. These were originally purchased by Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, from a Thomas Baker, a fellow of St John’s College of Cambridge, who had said that they were ‘of my own handwriting’ as copied from the ‘originals’ but they were criticised as being ‘unskilfully transcribed’. This was answered by it being said that this was due to ‘their being copied from the Original according to the old way of spelling’, but Baker never said where he obtained the ‘originals’ so it is not known if they are ‘originals’, copies or forgeries.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, the Victorian poet, said, “If Shakespeare is the dazzling sun of this mighty period, Marlowe is certainly the morning star”.

The last living hours of Christopher Marlowe are darkened with mystery. No one has left a description of his ‘last hours’ if those hours were anywhere in England. Remember that a friend had quoted Marlowe as saying that he desired to live in Scotland where their King James well appreciated the drama of the stage. Was this recent command by those of the Privy Counsel for him to appear before them daily the spur that finally caused him to take off to Scotland or to elsewhere so that he could continue to pen the dramas for the Stage that lay ‘til then so latent in his mind ? [Pentameter] Who knows what happened on that day in May ? What can be said that can be proven true? If nothing can be sure then just invent. Is this not what all poets are known to do ?

There is no document ever found that states why he was to appear and what was the charge if there was a charge Had there been a serious offence, he would not have been allowed to go out of the Whydoor.hewas summoned is still a mystery but his release indicates that his appearance had no relevance to anything of a religious nature and shows that there was no basis for the tumult of statements voiced and written that claimed that he had uttered numerous profane statements Why he was condemned in print after a considerable time following his burial is another mystery. It must have been known that he was one of the distinguished visitors to the house of Sir Walter Ralegh along with others who were ‘free thinkers’ but no similar warrant to appear before the Privy Council was extended to any of the other visitors to the house of Ralegh. These included most of those who led their particular fields of study at a time that was like no other since.One was England’s greatest astronomers, the mathematician Thomas Herriot, who was an inventor, a scientific discoverer, as he was the first to see the satellites of Jupiter, the spots on the Sun, the horns of Venus. Others were Robert Hughes and Walter Warner, both mathematicians, the poet Hoskins, Ben Jonson, the Rev. Gilbert Hawthorne, the poet Matthew Royden, the Earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, and a man who one would least suspect in the Ralegh house, the Earl of Oxford, Edward De Vere ! Marlowe was a drama writer who could be compared to no other and this is noted to the end in 1593. His last known work was the unfinished ‘Hero and Leander’ described as ‘the most beautiful poem of its age’. It was praised as ‘a dexterity in the manipulation of the rhyme, rhythm and language that no tyro could have attained’. It is unknown when it was written but it was entered into the Stationer’s Register on September 28, 1593 but not published until 1598 ! This is four months after his burial was noted ! The publisher was Edward Blunt whose name is often cited in ‘biographies’ of ‘William Shake speare’. Blunt dedicated the work to Sir Thomas Walsingham. George Chapman extended the poem and published it in 1598. “Come lyve wth mee and bee my love And wee will all the pleasures prove That vallyes groves and woodes or fieldes and craggie Rockes or mountaines yeildes.” This is Marlowe’s song from ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’ that is found quoted in ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’, while lines from his ‘Tamburlaine’ can be seen in Spenser’s ‘Fairy Queen’.

It is here put forward that Marlowe did not want the possibility of being falsely accused of some vague charge that may come from someone who had some false paper that could be placed before the Privy Counsel.

Another account of that day, number four, says: “Archival research has made the story of his death resulting from a tavern brawl look pretty thin. Eleanor Bull in whose house Marlowe ‘died’, was no Mistress Quickly. Her husband had held office in the household of Queen Elizabeth I and the widow Bull had high connections at court. The men with whom he spent his last hours had close links to the Elizabethan secret service. Two of his companions were small fish in the game, but the third, Robert Poley, a man whose life exudes a dry stench of betrayal and duplicity, had run the conspiracy that led to the execution of Mary Queen of the Scots. Poley had no need to fear questions from a coroner: On his return to the palace at Greenwich, he received a warrant specifying that in late May and early June he had been continuously working ‘in her majesty’s service’.” (from a newspaper review of two new books on Marlowe, March 19, 2005)“Kit Marlowe was killed in a fight a drinking house in Deptford, Kent. The puzzle is not so much that Marlowe was killed nor even who killed him. After a coroner’s inquest, the killer was said to have acted in self defence and was pardoned.” (From the Weekend Post. March 19, 2005)

Story number three has the four men dining at a rooming-house of “Eleanor Bull, a widow who rented rooms. The three men who moved in a shadowy criminal world were: Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley, curious company for Marlowe. According to the coroner’s report, Marlowe attacked Frizer from behind after grabbing Frizer’s dagger from his belt. Frizer fought back, grabbed the weapon and stabbed Marlowe in the right eye, killing him instantly. This account adds that “the coroner’s report had been discovered in 1925 in London’s Public Record Office”. No other version, all published during the 1950s or 1960s, makes mention of a ‘coroner’s report’. Again in this version Marlowe dies ‘instantly’. It is positively known that Marlowe was alive until the following day and his burial was the day after on June 1. (Details for story 3, taken from the Hamilton Spectator, September 4, 1993)

One such ‘poet’, William Vaughn, invented a story many years later in which Marlowe’s tragedy took place at a tavern in Deptford, which is west of Greenwich, and not south of that town in Chislehurst where Marlowe was staying, wherein it is Marlowe who intended to stab with his ‘ponyard’ a Francis Archer who ‘had invited him thither to a feast, and then while they were playing at tables’ (or draughts), Marlowe was himself so severely wounded by his opponent’s dagger that ‘hee shortly after dyed’. This is the slimmest story but what would William Vaughn know many years later ?

Another version of this event has Marlow and three men first dining in a tavern at no specified location or town but then throughout the afternoon the four strolled and talked together in an adjacent garden. Later they retired into an upstairs bedroom of the tavern where Marlowe and a man named ‘Frizer’ were leaning upon a bed when Marlowe made a grab for the dagger that Frizer wore in his belt. Then Frizer grabbed Marlowe’s arm holding the dagger and in the struggle, the dagger plunged into Marlowe’s eye to the depth of ‘two inches’, thus killing Marlowe on the spot. As serious as a dagger in the eye may be, that would not kill him ‘on the spot’. The reason for the tussle is that an argument broke out between the two over who would pay the tavern bill for the dinner. Yet the dinner was at noon and they left the tavern to wander in the garden and so the tavern keeper would not have allowed all four to leave without payment, unless the owner knew at least one of the three other men and trusted them to leave but to return.

Confiding his intent to leave the country with his nearest friend, Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe could have asked Thomas for some suggestions or he could have confided his purpose with Walter Ralegh who also had groundless charges made against him and he had spent time in the Tower. Marlowe was required to appear before the Privy Council daily in London and his absence could be Walsinghamfatal.could

Only a year or two before, the playwright, Thomas Kyd, was arrested on suspicion of being the author of ‘a libel that concerned the State’ after his room was totally ransacked looking for incriminating matter amongst his papers. The paper found was widely printed and available to everyone but he was still tortured to confess his writing of it.

“But what of my disappearance ? What will prove that I am not still alive ?”

“I knew that I could depend on you and I agree with everything you say.”

have said to him, “I believe that is the answer. The plague in London is having its victims each day, and I can arrange with one I know to choose from those corpses one of a man about your age and have it brought to me. To mask its being a victim of the plague, we can damage it, let us say, with a knife or dagger and relate that you were set upon and killed. Then, some tale of how you were set upon at night and stabbed, oh, let us say, in your eye, a deep, deadly wound. Then the Council will be notified why you cannot be present that day and no one will be the wiser and no one will be harmed. Now, let me arrange for you to be taken to a near port where you may take whatever route you choose and no one will know of your destination but myself. There you may continue with your writings and, and if you will, I can arrange for whatever you write to be brought to London where it be in the hands of whomever you choose. Oh, if you wish, I can let Ralegh know, at a later time. I’m sure he will understand. What do you say ?”

Marlowe’s ‘death’ was certified at an inquest held on June 1, 1593 and presided over by the Queen’s coroner and at which 16 local jurors acquitted the ‘assailant’, Ingram Frizer, on the grounds of self defence. This was the elaborate plan that was carried to the intended conclusion by Thomas Walsingham, who was the Queen’s spymaster acting on behalf of his friend, Christopher Marlowe.

This may have been the intension of Walsingham but did it happen this way ? It was discovered in 1955 what were the true events.

“The presence of the plague will produce many bodies. I will select one of a man about your age who has no relatives in London. Authorities will not know who it is and they will suspect not one thing.”

“Oh, regarding your name. I will choose one for you, one that, I can assure you, will not be of anyone who exists but one with no birth record in London or anywhere so that there can be no possibility of anyone having any chance o being suspicious. I will register the name I choose with the Stationers Office, as you know must be done to publish but I will take it slowly to see if there is any reaction to this new name. You may leave a long poem or two to see if there is any reaction to the new name.”

“Excellent. I’ll arrange to have your works to be delivered by a courier whom I will select and he will know you only by the name that I will choose. Now, the Burbadges will recognize your work but not your hand writing as I will have everything rewritten and when copied I will burn all original papers. If you need any books, I’ll do my best to find whatever you desire.

“I have one or two to leave with you.”

C Comedy of Errors, Coriolanus, Cymbeline. H Henry IV, V, VI, VIII. R Richard II, III I - Iulius Caesar, Iohn. TS Tempest, Two Gentlemen, Twelfth, Taming, Troilus, Timon, Titus.

A As You, All’s Well, Antony. R Richard III. L Love’s, Lear.

O Othello. W Winter’s. E -

The letters in the name, ‘William Shakespeare’, are entirely composed of the letters in the name ‘Christopher Marlowe’, using ‘CH’ with its ‘K’ sound for the letter ‘K’. Removing all letters within ‘Christopher Marlowe’ that are also is in ‘William Shakespeare’ will leave the letters ‘T’ and ‘O’ to say, “Christopher Marlowe (in)TO William Shakespeare”.Removing all letters common to both names leaves, ‘I Speak’.

O Othello. P Pericles H Hamlet. RE Romeo and Juliet M Merry, Measure, Much, Midsummer’s, Merchant, Macbeth.

Taking the three remaining letters in Marlowe’ name not beginning a play title, will spell “S E E, William Shakespeare is within Christopher Marlowe.”

The true event was revealed in 1955 when a plaque was erected honouring Christopher Marlowe.Itis of special interest that all 34 of the Folio Play titles begin with a letter in the name of ‘Christopher Marlowe’ and all of the letters in the name ‘William Shakespeare’ are in the name of Christopher Marlowe using ‘C’ with its ‘K’ sound for the letter ‘K’. The letter ‘I’ represented the letter ‘J’ in Elizabethan times.

The body was buried in an unmarked grave in St Nicholas Churchyard on June 1, 1593 and the body buried was that of John Penry who was the Separatists leader who had been executed the day before.

RIDOLFI AND BABINGTON Robert J. Meyer

MARY PLOTS II

the tales of the ten thousand Spanish troops specialized in the cruelties of conquest that had laid the Netherlands in waste through fire and slow starvation. All plots to come were fortified with that dread fear - the Ridolfi Plot, the Throckmorton Plot and the Babington Plot. All held the threat of that short sailing across the channel when those ten thousand would pour into Hartlepool.

The Duke of Norfolk, who had offered to marry the imprisoned Queen, was released from the Tower upon signing his oath not to have any more dealings with Mary but he immediately became involved with a Florentine banker, Roberto de Ridolfi, and with the Spanish ambassador, Don Gerald de Spes, the fanatic to whom Mary had written three years before saying, “Tell your Master if he will help me, I shall be Queen of England in three months”.

Ridolfi was a financial wizard in England since the Mary Tudor days and his reputation at banking was flawless. His monetary acumen came to the attention of Sir Francis Walsingham, the head of Elizabeth’s security, who operated, at his own expense, the most widely distributed spy system in Europe. As many as 53 agents were in his service at any one time, as he said, “Knowledge is never too dear”. Walsingham had Ridolfi’s house and business offices searched and finding nothing amiss, recommended him to Cecil as a go between to the King of Spain.

The Queen of England was powerless. All her ministers clamoured for the head of Mary to cut off the causes of this constant temptation to all, the foreign spy or the noble peer at her feet, but Mary was her kinswoman and a Queen could not consider the execution of a Queen without proven cause. Since Elizabeth could not co operate, her chief ministers would operate upon their own initiative. Sir William Cecil, Lord Burlegh, who was her Secretary of State, was also the originator of the ideal Plot wherein, by engineering the plots of others, complete control could be administered and by this means he created the Ridolfi Plot of 1571.

Mary Stuart in prison created for Elizabeth a 19 year unanswerable quandary. Elizabeth could not allow Mary her freedom for, as she had written, “When you are acquitted of this crime, I will receive you with all honour, till that is done I may not”, but still Mary in prison created a more constant threat to the English throne than before as newer and younger Mary-adherents could see that the only way to free her was by force, and if violent seditious action were needed, then they may as well be hanged for wolves as cringing curs. They felt it imperative that the whole horror be let loose with the dogs of war. The terror of the troops from Spain would exterminate all of the English will when Elizabeth was assassinated and Mary replaced the ‘illegitimate’NothingElizabeth.terrifiedas

Ridolfi was delighted that he had duped the Queen’s chief ministers whereas they had hoodwinked him by offering him as much rope as he needed to feel free, rope that could be hauled in at the proper time.

Mary, through the Bishop of Ross, told the Duke of Norfolk that if he fell in with her plans to escape, she would marry him, if not, then...but the crown beckoned to him so firmly that he entertained at his own house Ridolfi who there named forty Earls, Viscounts and Lords who would rally to the cause of deposing Elizabeth for Mary Norfolk wrote a letter through Ridolfi to the King of Spain: “We ask His Majesty for money, arms, ammunition, troops ... the most convenient port will be Harwich where I can myself be present. If Portsmouth be thought better, I will be there ”

Mary wrote Ridolfi to entreat for an annulment from Bothwell, and Ridolfi went to the continent openly on the service of Elizabeth where he laid out his plans before the Duke of Alva, the commander of the ten thousand Spanish troops. Alva saw only one answer Elizabeth must die before he would risk the venture.

Thomas Morgan made Gifford aware of others who knew of a bright young man with a most ingenious plot, Anthony Babington, charming, fashionable, introduced at Court, and rich enough to indulge his fancies and he fancied being the hero to put Mary on the Throne of England. Although only 25, he had convinced even Don Benardo de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in Paris, who advised Philip of Spain that Babington’s plot was the most serious of all plans yet attempted, but it depended upon the murder of Elizabeth.

Ridolfi chose to remain in Europe having been anointed with the rank of Senator. Norfolk’s house was searched, his secretaries tortured, and Norfolk, himself, sentenced to death. Three times did Elizabeth sign his death warrant, three times she rescinded it, before he was executed on the 2nd of June, 1572. The Ridolfi Plot, filled from the first with Cecil’s informers as with all Cecil’s plots, was masterminded to bring about harsh measures as the Penal Law of 1571 or those of 1585, the year of the Parry Plot. The supreme and masterful Babington Plot of 1586 was engineered specifically to force the execution of Mary Queen of the Scots.

Late in the summer of 1583, the year Sir Francis Walsingham became Secretary of State, a great comet appeared in radiant beauty in the sky over London, seen by its citizens as an ominous sign of things to come. “When beggars die there are no comets seen. The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.” So did the court of Elizabeth shrink from the comet in fear of looking upon it and in her presence. The Queen “with courage answering to the greatness of her state, ordered a window to be opened, and walked towards that strange light, saying, ‘Jacta est alea’, the dice are thrown’.

Ridolfi found an eager messenger in young Charles Baillie, a Mary fanatic, who was leaving Brussels for London with letters to noblemen’s wives. Baillie carried Ridolfi’s letter to the Bishop of Rosse as far as Dover where he was searched and the letter in code found, but Ridolfi had also given Baillie the key to the code. Baillie was thrown into a Tower dungeon where he was approached by a Doctor Story, a prisoner awaiting execution as a traitor, who convinced him to tell what he knew as it was known already. Baillie, in terror of the rack, gave away the entire plot to this Doctor Story who was an informer posing as a traitor, thus incriminating Ridolfi, Norfolk and Mary.

(Malcolm: Manner and Customs of London) Sir Francis Walsingham chose to cast the fatal die in the summer of 1586. Still the agent provocateur as head of his own secret intelligence, he wished to precipitate any dormant plot to place Mary on the throne knowing that the first to feel the rope would be Cecil and himself. Mary should have died right after the Ridolfi Plot but did not. This time the plot would thicken the resolve and not fail. Walsingham called up the dictum of Alexander the Great of yore - that any fortress could be taken with but two neighing asses, one loaded with gold, the other with a lily livered loon, within the enemy’s walls.

Walsingham calls in one of his special spies, Gilbert Gifford, a priest who had endured the Book shut up, the Candle tipped and the Bell tolled. Gifford would win the trust and confidence of Mary and whomever else he might contact. One was Thomas Morgan, imprisoned in the Bastille with privileges and kept by the French for future purposes. Gifford would inform him of a secret way to smuggle letters to Mary. Then Gifford visited Mary in her latest prison at Chartley under a stricter gaoler. So firm and watchful was he that Mary was surprised when he allowed her to speak privately with this ‘priest’, Gifford, who told her how letters could come and go by way of the box in the barrels. A brewer was bribed to place a wooden box in one of the barrels of ale admitted into the prison for the use of her retinue of servants and handmaids.

Letters would go in and out in an empty barrel, but in either direction under the nose of Sir Francis Walsingham. Mary grasped at the occasion.

Anthony Babington’s plan was sound. The flaws were in himself. Vain and cheeky, he needed Mary to recognize him as the brains and master spirit behind the plot. Mary should have known nothing of the plans, but Babington babbled everything to her through the barrel. She should have known to stop the writing, but she asked for more and he boxed everything in writing, the details, the methods, the names. He set his own trap as he could not shut his up

Babington, wanting a passport to the continent for his speedy departure when Barnewell killed the Queen, went, in his rash bravura, directly to the office of Walsingham and offered to act as a spy for him in Europe. Walsingham invited him in for a long chat and then again time after time. Completely relaxed in his boldness, even to dine with Sir Francis, he bragged to Walsingham’s secretary of having letters from the Queen of Scots. On one of these welcome visits, Babington somehow saw his name in a document and knew that they were playing cat and mouse with him. He panicked, disguised himself, and hid in St. John’s Woods. In only a few days, he and all his companions were once again reunited in their favourite meeting place, St. Giles Field where they watched each other, one by one, be hanged, drawn and quartered, all but Babington. They cut him down from the rope and knifed him apart while still alive ! The day was the 20th of September, the harvest season of plucking down ripe fruit had come. The next day, the ten thousand Spanish troops were losing in battle with Englishmen, first at Duisberg and now at Zutphen in Guelderland.

All such conversations were boxed and barrelled in and out of Mary’s chambers after passing through Sir Francis’ sieve of scrutiny. By June, 1586, Babington had enlisted a dozen or more young men who met each evening in London taverns. Ah, did they carve their names in the tables down at the Mermaid ? They gathered openly in the parks, ironically at times in St. Giles Field, and wishing to be immortalized as the saviours of the Scottish Queen, they had their group portrait painted. Their ostentatious posturing therein was later presented to Beth’s delving eyes. She realized their faces and knew them by name. Their names would be forever infamous, imbedded in time. Children at play could skip and chant to the patter of the grisly rhyme: “Abington, Babington, Ballard and Gage, Hanged at St. Giles in Elizabeth’s rage Salisbury, Savage, Barnewell and Jones

On the invitation that Elizabeth wished Mary to have a two weeks outing in Tixall while on a supervised hunt, Mary and her attendants left their chambers thus leaving them open to Walsingham’s men to search and to find her informative letters. Her correspondence was sizable, all planned attempts were in full account and lists of nobles who had approached her were handed to Elizabeth who glanced down the papers, threw them onto the fire while saying, “Video et taceo”. I see and I say nothing. Ballard was arrested but no others. They waited for Babington to pick up a letter from Mary that would arrive at Lichfield, then the trap would be snapped, but Babington did not go there as he promised. Days went by and Barnewell went ahead with his resolve to murder Elizabeth. As she strolled with companions in Richmond Park, six men walked toward her. She sought out Barnewell’s eyes and stared him down. He lost his nerve and slunk away.

To the children, these were just names, but at the time, they were intimate names in the Queen’s Court, Edward Jones was the son of the Master of the Wardrobe; Edward Abington, the son of her Under Treasurer, next to the Treasurer, William Cecil !

Drawn and quartered to break up their bones Charnock and Travers, Tichbourne and Donn, To charnel house and Houndsditch, every last one.”

February 8th, eight days before the triumphal march of solemn celebration in Sidney’s burial, Mary Queen of the Scots spoke the words, “Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit”. The axe struck thrice before her head rolled apart. When the executioner lifted it by the golden tresses, her head with short grey hair fell away, and he stood with the headless wig held high and cried, “God save the Queen !”, whereupon the Dean of Peterborough replied, “Amen ! Amen !”, but wherefore could he pronounce ‘Amen’ ? Why had not ‘Amen’ stuck in his throat ?

Sidney’s body was brought home, but lay for three months in a house in the Minories while creditors clamoured for their money. Sidney had provided for them in his will but the will was ‘imperfect’. His father in law paid 6000 pounds that he, Sir Francis Walsingham, could barely afford. Sidney’s uncle, the Earl of Leicester, gave nothing and refused to support Sir Francis’ appeal to the Queen to balance the debts. Yet, on February 16th, 1587, 700 people with Sir Francis Drake walked Sidney’s coffin, borne by black hooded yeomen, through the streets of London, heralded by pipers and drummers and followed by trumpeters proclaiming the Earl of Leicester upon his horse with Lords, Aldermen, Sheriffs, the Lord Mayor, and Sidney’s horse of war ridden by a small young page with a broken lance trailing. Fifteen days before, Elizabeth finally had signed Mary’s death warrant but gave no order for its use. The law was clear: anyone found guilty of the attempt of murder on the Queen must be put to death. The Queen had signed the warrant as Cecil reminded the gathered Council of Ten, so they would send the warrant and all would order the execution with safety in their number.On

The Great Leveller keeps constant count, Pairing equals but opposites with precise measure. Logic appears as magic; simplicity as paradox. The past is ever in continuous change. The impossible is inevitable. Philip Sidney was the Master of the English Sonnet. Mary the Queen was Mistress of sonnets in Latin and in French. She was condemned with a feather quill, he with a ball of lead.

When the executioner reached down for her jewels but now his trinkets and trophies, her little Skye terrier ran out from under her red velvet skirt and lay in her blood between her shoulders and her head. This little valiant dog never again took food. In the endless circling of the spheres, In the balancing equilibriums

Five hundred Englishmen went to cut off a provisions train supported by fifty volunteers, among them the Earl of Essex and England’s greatest poet, Sir Philip Sidney. On September 22nd, the morning mist rose and the English found themselves before 3000 Spanish troops. In their glorious engagement of lances against Spanish guns, Sir Philip Sidney was stung in the thigh with a musket bell as he was not wearing a thigh piece because Sir William Pelham was not wearing one. Sidney’s horse was shot from under him, and his second horse bolted the field back to the Earl of Leicester’s camp, Sidney spilling blood for a mile and a half. What was not a serious wound survived blood poisoning but three weeks later, Sidney succumbed to gangrene, his last words to his brother, Robert, ‘Love my memory’. On October 25th, Mary’s letters condemned her as ‘an imaginer and compasser of her Majesty’s destruction’ but Elizabeth would not sign the warrant. James VI of Scotland, now 20, sent Archibald Douglas with a request that his mother’s life be spared. Mary wrote to Elizabeth that she should die a martyr and asked for kindness to her servants which ‘wrought tears’ from Elizabeth.InNovember,

Her dog lay between her bloody shoulders and head. He rode bleeding between the shoulders and head of his horse. They were buried eight days apart, His body burrowed in the Cathedral of Paul, Her severed parts in the Cathedral of the Borough of Peter. In 80 years, his lead coffin was exposed in the ruins of the Great Fire. In 25 years, her coffin was removed and led to a monument of marble in the reign of her son.

Although any historian must refer to several of these variants, the accounts by some modern writers vary so widely that only direct quotations of words spoken are similar. Some are speculations that can be disproved by original accounts regardless of opposing versions by Mary and Ruthven.TheMurder of Riccio happened in Mary’s ‘apartments’ on the second floor of Holyrood Palace. These rooms consist today as they did then and are open to visitors. At the head of the main wide circular staircase is the large ‘presence chamber’, off and back of this is a not much smaller bed chamber, but off from this room at the back are two smaller rooms, one a ‘dressing room’, ‘not more that twelve foot square’. This room is not on view in the present, however the other room at the back corner to the left, the ‘supper-room’, is viewable but not accessible. The doorway is about 28 inches wide and five feet ten inches high and there is no door today. By standing just outside of this doorway to the roped off room, the viewer is surprised by how remarkably small this room is, considering what occurred there. It is by no means ‘twelve foot square’. No more than from ten to eleven feet deep, it is at the most six to seven feet wide. The fireplace is still to the right but on that night the room contained a ‘couch’ on which Mary reclined while eating, and a long table large enough to serve at least six people. Who occupied this tiny room having supper on the evening of Saturday March 9th ? The man who is the guide in the rooms today will say that ‘four other ladies accompanied the Queen’ that evening as well as Riccio, six people in all. From ‘Mary Stuart’s Scotland’ (1987 David and Judy Steel): “There were only half a dozen people around the table, including her half sister and half brother, her equerry, her page and Rizzio”.

Yet in ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ (1975 Jean Plaidy), “Her half sister, Jean, countess of Argyll, and her half brother, Robert Stewart, were present. Others included her Master of the Household, the Laird of Creich, her equerry Arthur Erskine, her doctor and of course her secretary David Rizzio.” Her page is here supplanted by her doctor and her Master of the Household, now seven in all.“As the supper was being served” (Fraser), “One of the servants went to the window to draw the curtains as the draught was strong. The door of the supper room opened suddenly” (Plaidy) and Lord Darnley appeared at the doorway having come up the narrow winding staircase at the back that opened at the second floor directly next to the door to the supper room and to the right of someone coming up the stairs.”

Patrick Lord Ruthven wrote his account at the end of March. Both are eyewitness accounts from opposing participants. A further account from Mary’s viewpoint is found in Claude Nau’s ‘Memorials of Mary Stuart’ written in 1578 three years after Nau became her secretary. All other descriptions are b y those who were not in Holyrood and are versions related to them.

MARY THE THEORIES (IV) Robert J. Meyer

Each modern historian describes the ‘Death of Riccio’, the ‘Escape from Holyrood’ and the ‘Kirk o’ Field Murder’ of Darnley in contradicting details. Yet, seemingly, the sources for these details were the same original documents written near the time of the events either by the participants or by those close to them.

Two of the main participants gave their versions of Riccio’s murder soon after that evening of March 9, 1567. Mary wrote her account of it in a letter to her ambassador to Paris, the archbishop of Glasgow on April 2 and dictated a letter to Queen Elizabeth on March 15th.

These are identified in ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ (1969 Antonia Fraser) as “Those present with her...her half brother Lord Robert Stewart, her half sister and confidante Jean, countess of Argyll, her equerry Arthur Erskine, her page Anthony Standen, and of course...David Riccio”.

Ruthven lurched to seize Riccio and someone in the room tried to stop him. Ruthven warned them, “Lay not hands on me, for I will not be handled.” At this he put his hand to his dagger and immediately his followers rushed into the room, “Andrew Ker of Fawdonside, Patrick Bellenden, George Douglas, Thomas Scott and Henry Yair” (Fraser). Here were five more burly fellows to bring the total of fifteen people, however small they were, in the tiny eleven by seven room, that also held the couch as well as the table that now was being knocked over while Jean, the countess of Argyll, adroitly grabbed the lighted candelabrum before it fell. Riccio was stabbed at least once, as Mary stated, by George Douglas ‘reaching over her person’ but according to Ruthven, Riccio was first dragged from the room and into the very large bed chamber and out through the ‘presence room’ before he was stabbed ‘between 53 and 60 times’ and then dragged to the top of the stairs, then thrown down the main circular staircase, 35 steps to the first landing, another eight to the second and thirteen more to the first floor. It is difficult to understand, looking into this supper room, how so many people could have been in there. There is no door to the room now, but a nineteenth century sketch of the room shows a door that opens inward which would further reduce the area of the room when opened.

Two existing paintings depicting ‘The Murder of Rizzio’ were produced in the nineteenth centur y, one by John Opie and the other by Sir William Allan ‘whose work gave impetus to historical painting in Scotland’. The Allan scene is admittedly ‘inaccurate’, ‘as the murder did not take place in Mary’s bedchamber’, however the inclusion of the canopied bed in the same room as the dining table is the least of the inaccuracies. Otherwise the two paintings are remarkably similar in their content. Both portray a very large room in which Riccio portrayed centrally and partly down on the floor held by a balding man with his right arm outstretched holding a dagger to plunge into Riccio.

Immediately after him Patrick Lord Ruthven burst into the room wearing ‘a steel cap’ and ‘with his armour showing through his gown’ (Fraser). With the ‘servant’, Darnley and Ruthven, at least nine, possibly ten people are in the tiny room.

In the Allan painting, three other men are portrayed. In each painting, Darnley is shown restraining Mary to the side as she leans toward Riccio. In the Opie painting, Darnley’s restraining arm is in steel armour.

In each painting a fully armoured man stands behind him. This man’s arms are fully covered with steel armour, his head, cheeks and his chin are covered with a helmet with upturned visor. In each are three other men with elaborate steel helmets of a different design but all with a raised rib along the centre of the crown. In each the head of a man, possibly one of the diners, looks over the shoulder of the central figure in the act of raising his dagger. In the Opie painting are two other intruders, one with a long curved dagger. A helmeted man carries a long pike and behind the others, coming in the door, four or more other pikes with torches are represented.

Ruthven who had been deathly ill in his bed in a house near Holyrood was believed to be dying and now thought to be delirious in a fever in his odd attire of steel cap and armour, his face pale and his eyes burning red. He would be dead in three months. Now he demanded Riccio.

“Let it please your Majesty, that yonder man David come forth of your privy chamber where he hath been overlong.” Mary protested that Riccio was there at her bidding and had Ruthven lost his senses ? According to his own testimony, Ruthven then entered into a long tirade denouncing Riccio’s relationship and favour with her and her banishment of Protestant lords. Mary confronted her husband Darnley and asked of his part in this intrusion. He fumbled and stammered realizing he was deeply involved with an intrigue he did not fully understand.

Each artist has depicted the same inaccuracies. Neither has conformed to the evidence that was available in the nineteenth century. Ruthven came into the small room wearing a ‘steel cap’ with ‘armour showing through his gown’. Who then is the man in full armour ? The man with the dagger holding Riccio must be George Douglas who, as Mary said, took a dagger from Darnley’s side and, reaching over her, stabbed Riccio. Yet in each artist’s portrayal, Darnley is far from Douglas and Mary is not between Riccio and Douglas. Both artists have shown Mary as slim waisted, and if anything should have been known about the incident, it was that Mary was six months pregnant. There is little understanding of who was at supper. No other woman is in the Opie painting, two women are in the background in the Allan. Other than the similar head of the man in the background no other man is included in either that could have represented anyone else who was present at the supper. Both paintings depict a very large cloth covered table. Neither is overturned. In the Allan portrait the table is set with trays, glass canter and goblets, one glass on its side.

Randoph, Cecil’s agent in Scotland, had written to the Earl of Leicester, on February 13, that “I know for certain that this Queen repenteth her marriage, that she hateth Darnley and all his kin. I know there are practices in hand contrived between father and son to come by the crown against her will. I know that if that takes effect which is intended, David, with the consent of the King shall have his throat cut within these ten days.” Randolph described what Riccio was wearing at the time of his death, ‘a night gown of damask furred, with a satin doublet and a hose of russet velvet’. In the Opie painting, Riccio has a gown, the lining of which is red and not ‘furred’. He is wearing wrinkled pants but not hose. In the Allan painting, Riccio is wearing hose but they are not red and he is not wearing a gown. In both portraits, he is clean shaven. In a famed nineteenth century engraving of Riccio believed taken from a contemporary portrait, he wears a beard and moustache. In Mary’s statement about Bothwell and Huntley assisting her in escaping from Holyrood on the Monday following the murder of Riccio, she does not say that either was present at the Palace but that ‘these noblemen being without fear and willing to sacrifice their lives, to this end arranged to let us down at night from the walls of our palace in a chair by ropes and other devices that they had prepared’. Bothwell and Huntley had escaped through a window near the lions pit and were at Dunbar castle arranging for Mary’s escape but accounts vary as to how Bothwell had planned for her escape.

The sturdy table with lace cover and the two ornate dining arm chairs are clearly not sixteenth century but Victorian. This table and the two chairs would have filled the supper room. A half round ‘lute’ lies on the floor. Riccio’s flat guitar is now in the Royal College of Music in London. A closer inspection reveals behind the two women yet anther man in helmet who is drawing aside the drapery on the wall as if entering from a doorway, but the doorway with the outwardly open door is several feet to his right in the picture. Both portraits depict a huge room with the people widely spread apart. Mary described the intruders by saying “one part of them standing before our face with bended daggs”, which are pistols, and that Fawdonside had held his pistol to her stomach. After the birth of her son, she upbraided Darnley reminding him of that moment, “What if Fawdonside’s pistol had shot, what would become of him and me both ? Or what estate would you have been in ?” Yet neither of these portraits shows any of the men with a pistol. The same inaccuracies appear in both pictures as if one artist was influenced by the other or as if neither artist had made himself familiar with the recorded statements about the incident nor had either researched the location at Holyrood Castle or had seen the nineteenth century sketch of the supperThomasroom.

The wardship of this royal Castle was held at that time by the laird of Craigmillar and during Mary’s short stay there she transferred that wardship from the laird to Bothwell in appreciation for his part in her escape from Holyrood, but until that moment Dunbar was not at ‘Bothwell’s private Castle’ for ‘their secret tryst’ as is implied in the popular stories. On the 15th of March, Mary wrote to Elizabeth describing her ordeal and the murder of Riccio. Nobles and men began coming to her side at the urging of the nobles who joined her at Seton until 4000 men had gathered. In response to her proclamation on the 17th for people to support her the next day, she was able on the 18th of March to enter Edenburg triumphantly with 8000 men but with Darnley appearing properly dispirited by her side. With Darnley obviously deserting their cause, the members of the conspiracy vacated Edenburg in all directions. To England went Fawdonside (Ker), Lindsay, Ruthven and Morton, but brother Moray not having been in Edenburg until Monday following the murder, remained in the town to show his ‘innocence’ in the plot. Two of the intruders into the supper room, Henry Yair and Tom Scott, an under sheriff of Perth, were executed later in August.

Much had already transpired in the month of March 1566. On Thursday the seventh of March, Parliament had assembled and Mary had gone to Tolbooth in Edenburg, as it was known in the mid sixteenth century, for the election of the Lords of the Articles at which ceremony Bothwell bore the sceptre, Huntley the crown and Crawford the sword for the Queen. Darnley was not there still aggravated by not being granted the crown matrimonial. During this session Mary demanded that parliament draw up a bill of attainder against Moray that was to be passed on the twelfth of March. On the Saturday March 9th, Riccio was murdered. Now it was Tuesday March 12 when Mary arrived at Dunbar Castle

The romantic legend of Mary and Bothwell is originally due largely to George Buchanan (1506 82), a Scottish historian who taught at the University of Coimbra in Portugal until he was interned as a heretic. He returned to Scotland in 1561, the year that Mary returned, at which time he is stated to be her tutor. (F&W Enc) At that time he was loyal to Mary but turned against her after the death of Darnley. He is the author of several accounts whose purpose was to ‘prove’ Mar y’s guilt in “a licentious affair” with Bothwell. He was bound in allegiance to the Earl of Lennox, the father of Darnley, and was obliged to favour the murdered king.

Mary, it seems, devised her own escape, as being lowered on ropes was not advisable in her condition. She convinced Darnley that his life was as much in danger as her own. He arranged to stay with her in her room on the pretext that he would guard her from escaping and he had the soldier guards removed from outside her chambers. At midnight on Monday, they went down the narrow winding back staircase and out through the kitchen, past the adjoining Abbey and cemetery where her Equerry, Erskine, her page, Standen, and others waited with horses. Mary rode with Erskine on the same horse and Darnley rode another. They went first to Seton to join some nobles and then proceeded to Dunbar where Bothwell and Huntley rode out to meet them.

In one account, Huntley’s mother, Lady Huntley who waited upon Mary, had smuggled a message to her son ‘in her chemise’, although her outer garments were searched, ordering him to be ready at Seton to meet Mary. Another account has Lady Huntley smuggling in a message that ropes would be smuggled in to lower Mary down to where horses would be ready.

During this arduous journey for Mary, she was constantly urged and berated by Darnley to speed at all costs even at the risk of loosing her child. This could not be her legendary romantic ride with Bothwell supposedly to Dunbar Castle that was invented in later stories.

In these writings Buchanan’s design was to establish a lascivious liaison between Bothwell and Mary and to imply that the prurient partnership had begun long before the death of Darnley, which would also give a motive for both to collude in his murder. Buchanan was later appointed principal of Saint Leonard’s College of the University of St. Andrews, director of chancery and keeper of the Privy Seal and tutor to James VI but in his fantasies he became so irrational that his accusations are easily seen as absurd to anyone who is familiar with the documented conversations and reports of events of the time. Nowhere is there any contemporary reference to an irregular or fanciful involvement of Mary with Bothwell either before Darnley’s death or afterwards prior to the marriage of the two which came unexpectedly to all but those nobles involved in the bond that Bothwell should and must marry the Queen since she was then without a husband.Noone ever reported anything resembling an affair even though the life of Mary and her relationships were open to the active pens of those ambassadors in her Court who were sending reports back to France, Spain and particularly to the Court of Elizabeth and to Westminster by the spy agents of Cecil who wrote constantly of the affairs in Scotland and were eager to relay any gossip whispered through the halls of Holyrood. The entire collection of documents that was sent to France and therefore could not be altered and even those sent to London that could have been but were not told of a Queen that had nothing but contempt for her husband but held not one word of an affection for Bothwell. If there had been any gossip or an unfounded rumour of such an inclination, it would have been zealously transmitted.

A review of the entire time between the birth of Prince James and the death of Darnley, all minutely recorded, reveals that soon after the birth in June 1566, Mary left Edenburg for Newhaven near the end of July, then went by sea to Alloa without either Bothwell or Darnley.

The only other source of erroneous legends about Mary and Bothwell came as inventions of the Victorian Age. Many of these legends are anonymously repeated by those who obviously were not familiar with the historical realities and possibly through the lure of over romantic embellishments popular in the nineteenth century and who deliberately chose the preferred salacious elaborations of the George Buchanan writings that may have been available in their entirety or in tempting excerpts of their ‘tasty bits’.

Buchanan’s allegation that Riccio had been buried in the royal vault with body of James the Fifth was squelched when the vault was opened in the seventeenth century, yet even the most ludicrous descriptions by Buchanan continued to be repeated in the Victorian Age but other tales began to originate in that highly resourceful period. The allusion that James the First of England was not the son of Mary but a changeling, the child of the countess of Mar, that was substituted at the death of the real prince at birth became a popular belief when in 1830, the bones of what was said to be a child were found by workmen when opening a wall in Edinburgh Castle. The bones were wrapped not in a gold cloth with royal cipher as was then stated but in a woollen cloth and there was no contemporary reference to such a birth nor is there one in the archives of the Earls of Mar. Not only is there no contemporary reference to an affair between Mary and Bothwell, but there is great evidence that there could not have been such an affair for lack of opportunity alone either through the ill physical condition of each or their being in widely separate locations or through a total lack of privacy.

He took this burden of fidelity to the extreme of duplicity and falseness in writing the ‘Book of Articles’ that was used to accuse Mary at her trial in England, and also in his books, ‘History’ and ‘Detection of Mary Queen of Scots’.

This is stated by the Earl of Bedford who also reported that Bothwell at that time was becoming unpopular among the other nobles and that he suspected a plot against him. In August Mary went hunting in Peebleshire with Bothwell, Moray and Mar but without Darnley who later joined her at the home of John Stewart of Traquair, her captain of the queen’s guard, on the Tweed River where a stag hunt was planned. However, Mary was in ill health during both July and August. When she begged off the hunt the next day as it would be too stressful, Darnley created an embarrassing scene at supper making insulting remarks about her condition as he had on the ride to Dunbar.

Upon her return to Edenburg, she spent her time at Stirling Castle where although she gave the baby James into the care of others, the Erskines, as was the Scottish royal custom, she watched over him constantly and anxiously, oversaw the preparations for the nursery and planned for his christening.

Upon returning to her dwelling at Jedburgh, a ‘bastel-house’ or fortified house on the main street, which is still in its original structure, Mary fell violently ill retching ‘more than sixty times’, falling unconscious several times, and then two days later, she could neither see nor speak, but was convulsing frequentl y.

Two incidents occurred near the end of September when Darnley confronted Mary in the presence of others. The first was in the company of the French ambassador and a number of nobles where both he and Mary aired their complaints regarding Darnley’s rights and rank as king. On the 30th of September, after receiving a letter from Darnley’s father, the Earl of Lennox, saying that his son was offended and intended to sail abroad, Mary challenged her husband before the Council and the French ambassador, du Croq, and demanded to know how he was offended and was she doing anything to offend him. Darnley finally backed down saying that he had no cause nor had she given him any. No one alluded to Bothwell or to any affair between the Queen and anyone, neither Darnley at this meeting nor his father in his letter, nor did du Croq mention anything about Bothwell in his ensuing letter to Catherine de Medici in France.In early October, Mary went 50 miles south to Jedburgh where she held a ‘justice eyre’. During the public proceedings there, Mary was informed that Bothwell had been seriously wounded in his duty as lieutenant of the borders protecting that region from incursions by the English. She heard that he was laying, possibly in critical condition, at the royal Castle Hermitage that was near the border. She continued with her several responsibilities at the meetings until they were completed about six days later, and when they were fulfilled, she along with her half brother Moray, a number of her court people and soldiers, rode over to the Hermitage to see Bothwell who was her lieutenant and a chief adviser and to determine his condition. Although this military outpost in Liddesdale twelve miles south of Hawick which is ten miles west of Jedburgh could station 1,000 men, there were no proper facilities at the bleak and the foreboding 12th century Hermitage for the royal retinue of court people and nobles, so they rode back to Jedburgh a distance of 25 miles and a total length of 50 miles for this single day’s journey on October 16th, 1566. A commemorative ride on horseback was held on the 400th anniversary of that date in 1966 that took from seven in the morning until noon to reach the Hermitage and from one in the afternoon until seven at night for the return journey indicating that Mary and her retinue had no more than an hour or so to remain there.

After a brief recovery, she once again fell ill by October 25th, ‘all her limbs were so contracted, her face was so distorted, her eyes closed, her mouth fast and her feet and arms stiff and cold’, most present believed she was at the brink of death and some servants thought she was already dead and opened the windows of the tiny room.

The word ‘fact’ is used twice here both times incorrectly. A ‘fact’ is something that has been proven. In both references here, something is ‘evidence of the fact that...’. If a love affair between the two were ‘a fact’ there would be no further need of evidence. No one was ever a witness to a love affair, no one ever mentioned one and there was no written acknowledgment, any of which might have proved a ‘fact’. Mary’s illness is not evidence of a love affair nor is her recovery and neither proves this to be a’fact’ Yet, by a modern authoress, the opposites, illness and recovery, are each offered as ‘evidence of the fact’, of ‘a love affair’.

A planned voluntary ride of 150 miles from Edenburg and back for a ‘romantic tryst’ of sixty minutes under the scrutiny of her brother and other nobles would seem startlingly witless. There is no evidence that she planned to go to Hermitage until she heard of his injury during and not before the hearings at the justice eyre. Another departure from reason and the facts is the author’s implication that Mary collapsed at or near the Hermitage Castle and the statement that she ‘was taken to the house of Lady Fernyhirst in a litter’. Firniehurst Castle is a mile or two south of Jedburgh twenty five miles from Hermitage, an impossible journey in a litter.

The nobles, the servants and particularly Mary’s doctor would have been astounded if Mary ‘began to recover’ from complete inertness with no signs of life upon being told that ‘Bothwell did not die’. She knew Bothwell’s injuries were far from being life threatening.

The author does not say how long she thinks Mary stayed at Hermitage, but the visit was not much more than an hour that would be time enough to confer with him and to ascertain the extent of his injuries. As for choosing ‘to attend this particular assize’, the only reason this ‘justice eyre’ is known is her serious illness afterward and there is no reason to believe that her attendance at this one was arbitrary.

Some spoke of preparations for the funeral, some accused Moray of trying to appropriate silverware. Only her doctor detected some life and poured wine down her throat whereupon she threw up blood and revived.

During the month of October, then, Bothwell lay 25 miles away with wounds to his head and hand while Mary lay in a small room in Jedburgh violently ill and given up for dead. It would be difficult to see these grievous conditions as evidence of a passionate love affair between these two people, but it seems it is not impossible to stretch such rationalization either then orInnow.theretelling of these events in her book ‘Mary Queen of Scots, Fair Devil of Scotland’ (1975), Jean Plaidy has Mary receiving the news about Bothwell’s wounding ‘as she neared the town’ of Jedburgh which she specifically chose ‘to attend this particular assize’ to be near him, although his castle is still 25 miles away. She does not go immediately to him as this ‘would have been to betray herself’. So she ‘waited until the assize was over and then went to his castle’. Nothing is mentioned of Moray and numerous nobles and soldiers accompanying her. ‘After visiting Hermitage she collapsed and was taken to the house of Lady Fernyhirst in a litter’ no mention of the 25 mile journey back to Jedburgh ‘this seems further evidence the of fact that she was in love with Bothwell’. Then, after stating that ‘she nearly died, she plunged into terrible melancholy and was heard to say that she wished she were dead’, the author tells of the retching, the convulsions and the servants believing she was dying, and then says, ‘Yet, when Bothwell did not die, she began to recover’. Because Mary ‘summoned her lute player’ and ‘her pipe player, and ‘she planned a new dress which should be made in readiness for her when she rose from her bed’, ‘Thus there seems evidence of the damning fact that Bothwell and Mary were lovers before the death of Darnley ’

In Buchanan’s story, Mary immediately upon hearing of the wounded Bothwell, rode feverishly to his side, seemingly alone as he says nothing about Moray and the rest of the nobles.

If this entire letter was a forgery the original was never shown to anyone and Mary never wrote in Scottish or English is this list to refer to other writings, particularly ‘Remember you...of the purpose of Lady Reres’. George Buchanan had written another incriminating anecdote about Mary wherein Bothwell while half naked was lifted by a rope from the bed of one mistress and instantly into the bed of the queen. The rope, with Bothwell on the end of it, was lugged up to an upper room, according to Buchanan, by Mary’s wet nurse, Lady Reres and this was to have happened just after the birth of the baby. These ‘Casket letters’ were long and involved and it would have taken a great length of time to compose and write them. Yet, as presented as evidence of a love affair, these letters were supposedly written in Lennox Castle, the home of Darnley’s parents in Glasgow, to Bothwell who was supposedly in Edenburg and with whom she would be under the same roof of Holyrood in two days’ time conceivably not many hours after the letters would have arrived.

Buchanan also describes how Mary then had Bothwell moved to her house at Jedburgh in a room below hers so that they could continue their lascivious liaison with abandon while recuperating from their ills. No one seems to have questioned how many sheets of parchment the ambassador to France would have needed to convey to the Countess of Medici the full details of these bedroom scenes including who and how many were present in the room at each salacious occasion. However worthy only of ridicule, such tales as this one were later delivered to London to be used against her. Although no one was permitted to see the original ‘Casket Letters’ that ultimately condemned Mary or at least made it impossible for her to defend herself against their implications, in the published version in Scottish of the most damning letter purported to be written by Mary to Bothwell, refers to and compares Darnley’s breath, due to his illness that Mary knew not the nature of, to ‘your uncle’s breath’, but Bothwell had no uncle, except a greatuncle, the bishop of Moray, whom she had met only once four years before. However, her half brother had an uncle, who was the Earl of Mar and the guardian of her son, the implication being that this portion of the letter was not written to Bothwell but to her brother. Also in the letter was a strange list, seeming to be a reminder of items for her to mention to the recipient of the letter who was supposed to be Bothwell. ‘Remember you...of the purpose of Lady Reres, of the Inglishmen, of his mother, of the Earl of Argyll, of the Earl Bothwell, of the lodging in Edinburgh’ or were they self reminders ? Why would she place, ‘Remember you...of the Earl Bothwell’ to the Earl of Bothwell ?

Mary didn’t immediately plunge into a fit of retching ‘more than sixty times’ nor did she cough up blood from ‘melancholy’. She is recorded by du Croq as often saying, ‘I could wish to be dead’ but that was on a later occasion at the end of November and at the castle of Craigmillar.

By omitting details both essential and well documented, and by shuffling statements out of chronological order, a case can be made for a premise for which there is no concrete evidence but only to those that are not aware of the details. When Mary was alive and in the English prison, George Buchanan wrote the most deceptive tale of these same events but his words would be frivolous only to those who had access to the true accounts.

Mary may have ordered ‘a red silk, taffeta and black velvet’ dress at some time but upon recovering at Jedburgh, she called the nobles into her room and began dictating some of her wishes for her son in the event of her death with a warning that Darnley was not to seize the crown ‘to which he laid claim by right’.

Mary fell ill but for the reason that she had satisfied her lusts in the bed of the lacerated lecher.

In November, Mary went to the castle of Craigmillar, outside Edenburg but was still in the care of her physicians. She is reported to complain of Darnley and the subject of divorce was discussed by several of the nobles, Maitland, Huntley, Argyll, Moray and then, later, by Bothwell whereupon they all, including James Balfour and later Morton but not Moray, signed a bond arranging for a divorce upon stipulated grounds.

In December, great preparations for the christening of James occupied Mary’s time at Stirling Castle. The ceremony on December 17 was accompanied afterwards by festivities of fireworks, masques and the readings of verses. The nobles were clothed in colours all at Mary’s expense, ‘some in cloth of silver, some in cloth of gold’. As Argyll was clothed in red, Moray in green and Bothwell in blue, Buchanan who had written some of the verses for the occasion made full use of these colourful details later to report that Mary alone had dressed Bothwell in blue.

The one who stayed alone in his room during the entire ceremonies was Darnley who at the end of December went to his father’s Lennox Castle in Glasgow where he ‘came down with the pox’ and repeatedly wrote to Mary begging her to come to him as he was desperately ill.

These six vacant words also describe the entire life of a non-existent man in terms as being a Master Poet, the Greatest Dramatist in English history, exceptional Actor, Director, Theatre Owner, imagined by dozens of biographers and historians who have created out of one found word, ‘Shake speare’, on eight Quartos of the same late Elizabethan Era as the ‘Casket Letters’ that led to the murder by Royal Decree of Mary Queen of the Scots.

These six words also describe the daydream regarding Wllm of Stratford as being any type of author when all the research into the true official documents regarding this money lender has never confirmed that he had even composed a letter of correspondence.

Thus was the time spent between the birth of the prince and the death of Darnley by Mary and by Bothwell with no one reporting any hint of an affair between them with the noted exception of the ‘romance’ concocted in later years by Buchanan a ‘romance’ in the true meaning of the word, a fancy, a fiction, a fable, a fantasy, a falsehood, a lie.

Mary’s mother was Mary de Guise, daughter of Claude Duc de Guise and Antoinette de Bourbon, and sister to Francis de Guise, the handsome soldier, and Charles de Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine. Mary de Guise, a member of an important family was adopted by the king, Francis I as his daughter and she was married to the Duc de Longville.

THE TRAINING OF MARY THE QUEEN Robert J. Meyer

In January 1538, the widow Mary de Guise married James V to the immense displeasure of Henry VIII. Two years later Mary bore a son and a second son the following year, but both died within a few days of each other. In 1542, James did battle with the English forces of Henry VIII at Solway Moss and lost in humiliating defeat in November. James dropped into a deep depression, went to bed and didn’t care if he ever rose out of it. However, the news of the birth of a third child gave him hope until he heard that it was a girl. He turned his face to the wall and correctly prophesied his impending death. Within six days Mary, the infant daughter, was proclaimed Queen of the Scots. When she was four years old, both Henry VIII and Francis I, the great rivals of the 16th century, died, both to be replaced by their weak or sickly children, 10 year old Edward VI and 28 year old Henry II of France who at 14 had married the Florentine rich merchant’s daughter, Catharine de Medici, who brought him a fortune. His father, Francis I, had encouraged him with a beautiful mistress, 17 years his senior, Diane de Poitiers whom he loved for the rest of his life. Into this court, six year old Mary came to live and to be groomed for the Throne of France. Her future husband, Francis, then five years old, along with his several brothers, sisters and Mary were tutored in the most intellectual Court in the world. Francis I had filled his court with musicians, artists, poets, craftsmen and scientists. In his pay was Benvenuto Celini, the goldsmith, and at 700 crowns, the unique master of all trades in all of recorded history, Leonardo da Vinci. The Court of Henry II, his son, continued to draw the brightest and most original artists and thinkers on the continent. The Queen Catharine had brought with her from Italy, the astrologers, the Ruggieri brothers, and, to chart the children’s horoscopes, she brought to the court AroundNostradamus.1549, the poet Pierre de Ronsard and his group of seven influenced by the Italian poet, Francisco Petrarch, formed the Pleiade dedicated to raising the level of French literature.

Ronsard’s ‘Odes’ (5 volumes) was published in 1550 2, poems modelled after Pindar and Horace; his ‘Amours de Cassandre’ (1552), after Petrarch; his ‘Continuation des Amours’ (1555) and his ‘Hymnes’ in 1556, all of these written during the years that Mary was tutored in King Henry II’s Othercourt.members of the Pleiade were Ronsard’s teacher at the College Conqueral, the classicist Jean Dorat, along with Rene Belleau, Etienne Jodelle, Pontus de Thiard, Jean Antoine de Baie and Joachim de Bellay who wrote ‘L’Olive’, 115 sonnets after the style of Petrarch. In 1558, Bellay wrote two other sonnet collections, one was translated 33 years later in 1591 as ‘The Ruins of Rome’ by Edmund Spenser. These, too, were produced in the years when both Ronsard and de Bellay were literary tutors of Mary and the royal children in the royal nursery. Several of the Pleiade members were brought to Court under Royal patronage and Mary was the favourite of these poets. They all idealized the emotion of love in their poems, the foremost sonnet influence on the young Mary.

In January 1537, the Duc and Mary attended the wedding in France of James V of Scotland. Henry VIII had offered him his daughter Mary by Catharine of Aragon to solidify his claim to the Scottish throne, but James chose Magdelene, the daughter of Francis I. In May, James took his bride back to Scotland where two months later, she died as did the Duc de Longeville to whom Mary De Guise bore a second son who died in December.

Elizabeth’s own court was culturally severe compared to that of Henry II. Although the Elizabethan Age was the greatest in English literature, the arts were not supported or reflected in the Court of Elizabeth and certainly not as the arts were patronized and encouraged in the Courts of Francis I or Henry II. The Court of Elizabeth could not boast of near so many poets and scientists as the Court of France. Elizabeth was entertained in the last half of her 45 year reign by the several new acting companies and not by the Burbadge acting company only, but there is no evidence that any of the mere actors did any more than perform their plays and leave. None of the playwrights is known to be entertained by Elizabeth even in conversation. None was personally commissioned by the Queen to write a play, a poem or a masque, notwithstanding the later legend of Elizabeth’s asking for a play about ‘Falstaff in love’. Sir Philip Sydney was more honoured for the musket ball he took than for the muse he gave. Edmund Spenser was rescued from anonymity by Walter Ralegh, not by Elizabeth Regina. In the flourishing Age of English Drama, the acting companies were protected from arrest not by the Queen but by the nobility such as the Earls of Leicester (Robert Dudley), Pembroke (Herbert), Derby (Lord Ferdinando Strange), The Lord Admiral (Howard) and the Lord Chamberlain. The companies were financed not by these ‘patrons’ but only by their performances in the theatres, the tavern yards and occasionally before the Queen’s Court, an average of three times a year for the Burbadge company. When Mary’s son, James the First, came to the English throne, he ordered more than three times the command performances than Elizabeth from the Burbadge acting company alone which he took under personal patronage as The King’s Men.

Mary Stuart was already a queen at six days, and at six years she was groomed to be Queen of France directly after the fully adult King Henry II, the son of Francis I. Beyond this contrast in the lines of succession, the cultural atmospheres of the Courts of Henry VIII and Henry II in which the two girls were separately raised were in vivid contrast.

Did Moray expect that the English would accept the Scots version as being the authentic writings of Mary since they were written in Scots ? Would not the English commissioners realize that Mary always wrote in French at that time and that Bothwell to whom they supposedly were written had spent at least three years in France ?

No such environment had surrounded the tutelage of Elizabeth of England, although she spoke Latin and French and appreciated poetry. Elizabeth and her half sister, Mary, were raised by their stepmother, Anne of Cleves. Since Edward and Mary preceded Elizabeth in line to the throne and both could beget heirs who at the time of tutelage would be expected and who would also precede Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s training would not be as intensive as it would be if she were the only claimant to Henry VIII’s crown.

Walter Ralegh was probably the most artistic and romantic member of Elizabeth’s Court. She enjoyed his own poems that he read to her but Ralegh was first an adventurer, a member of parliament, a minister of the fleet and a man of business enterprise. Otherwise, names of thinkers were not a part of Elizabeth’s court. They were mostly the compatriots of Ralegh. Elizabeth sometimes consulted the mathematician and astrologer, Dr Dee, but the courts of Francis and Henry of France, forty and fifty years before, had personages whose names have lived apart from their monarchs and their times for more than four centuries. No one knew in which language the famous ‘Casket Letters’ and sonnets were written, the ephemeral pages that were used to condemn Mary to the block, as no one was allowed to see them. Everyone had to take Moray’s and Morton’s word for what they were told of them. The English commissioners were shown a version in Scots but not in English.

Mary while in captivity wrote her first letter in English to Sir Francis Knolleys in September of 1568 in which she asked him to forgive her ‘evil writing’, it being her first letter in English.Also during her captivity, Mary wrote an expression of regret to Elizabeth in sonnet form in French and in the rhyming scheme of Petrarch in which she feared that she would once again be prevented from meeting her ‘dearest’ sister. Mary is known to have written sonnets in French and Latin throughout her life.

John Dudley then fed lies about his enemy, Seymour, into the ears of young Edward until the boy king agreed to execute his uncle for ambitions, and to name Dudley as Regent and Protectorate. As the young frail king was showing serious signs of tuberculosis, he was prescribed medicines. As a precaution to secure his own line of power, Dudley convinced the boy to sign a will in which he invalidated the rightful claims of succession to the throne of both Mary and Elizabeth, his half sisters, by naming as sole heir, Lady Jane Grey, who was now Dudley’s daughter in law. Soon after, Edward died and rumours began that he had been poisoned.Plots and schemes are most successful when conflicting evidence is present, when all is not what it seems to be, and false information is deliberately introduced to stir up controversy and to complicate any attempt to unravel the tangled web of mystery and intrigue. So it was with this plot and with the many carefully conceived schemes that entwined the life of Elizabeth, as Princess and Queen, by which many rose to heights of power while others fell from grace into the fateful Tower.

THE PLOT TO MURDER EDWARD VI Robert J. Meyer

Henry VIII left three direct heirs to the throne: Mary by his first wife, Catharine of Aragon whom he divorced, Elizabeth by his second wife, Anne Boleyn, whom he had beheaded, and Edward by his third wife, Jane Seymour, who died shortly after Edward’s birth. The girls were raised by Henry’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, until Henry divorced her. Catharine Howard, his fifth wife and a cousin to Anne Boleyn was beheaded and Catharine Paar, his sixth, outlived him.

Who poisoned Edward ? His hair and nails had fallen out shortly after Lord Robert Dudley was sworn as one of the King’s Gentlemen of the Bedchamber. His father, the Regent, was also considered to be charged with murder, but was Edward deliberately poisoned or was it the minerals in the well intentioned medicines for the sickly lad or did the illness take him ? No one was ever charged with his murder if it were murder.

Upon Edward’s death, those nobles loyal to his half sister, the Catholic Mary, immediately spirited her away so that John Dudley would not be able to act upon his plan to take Mary to the Tower on the pretence of crowning her there but where she was to be imprisoned. When Lord Robert Dudley arrived to take her to be ‘crowned’, she was not to be found. Lord Robert, nineteen at the time, made the official proclamation of his sister in law, Lady Jane Grey, as Queen.Those nobles, faithful to keeping a Protestant Queen on the throne to protect their confiscated ecclesiastic estates and wealth that were showered upon them by Henry VIII, were quickly defeated in battle by Mary’s noblemen. Mary quickly sent all to the Tower for execution, John Dudley and all his sons including Lord Robert and Lord Guildford and his wife, Lady Jane who spent her nine days as Queen in the Tower.

Edward, being male, was first in line as heir, and at the age of nine he became Edward VI with his mother’s brother, Edward Seymour, chosen by Henry, as Regent. Seymour was soon challenged for his important position as Regent, acting politically for the young king, by the powerful John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and later Duke of Northampton. Dudley had five sons and three daughters, most of whom he used in preparing his scheme to lay claim to the throne of England for his family. He arranged marriages for two of his sons to the daughters of influential families and his fifth son, Lord Robert Dudley, was married to Amy Robsart, the only daughter of Sir John Robsart. A Robsart had been the standard bearer at Agincourt for Henry V. Dudley’s fourth son, Lord Guildford Dudley, was married to an heir to the throne by another direct line from Henry VII, Lady Jane Grey who was the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Mary Tudor.

The Queen then told de Quadro in audience on the following day, Saturday, that Amy was dead or ‘nearly so’ as he quoted her. It was the Queen’s 27th birthday. She cautioned de Quadro not to mention this in his reports.

After Amy was found dead, de Quadro wrote: “The Queen has published the death of Lord Robert’s wife and has said in Italian, Si ha rotto il collo. She must have fallen down a staircase”.

Both Elizabeth and Robert Dudley spent the same time in the Tower where legend has it that they fell in love, a bond between them that lasted for the next 35 years until Robert died in the Armada year of 1588.

Elizabeth was but 22 months on the throne when Amy Robsart was found dead at the bottom of the stairs in her home at Cumnor Hall. She had been alone in the house all that day, Sunday the eighth of September, 1560. All the attendants were at ‘Our Lady’s Fair’ at Abington and Amy’s body was not found until the servants returned in the evening.

Two days before the fatal day, on Friday the sixth of September, de Quadro spoke personally with the Queen, after which he reported that meeting to William Cecil, the Queen’s secretary, whom he knew was vying with Robert Dudley for the favourite position. Robert wished to displace him. Cecil begged de Quadro to “point out to the Queen the effect of her misconduct and that Lord Robert would be better in Paradise than here” “Last of all”, he said. “they were thinking of destroying Lord Robert’s wife. They had given out she was ill but she was not ill at all; she was very well and taking care not to be poisoned”.

The mystery arises from what was known beforehand. Most of what is known comes from reports by the Spanish Ambassador, Alvaro de Quadro, Bishop of Aquila, who wrote during the previous fall: “I have heard from a certain person who is accustomed to give veracious news that Lord Robert has sent to poison his wife.” In March, he added: “There is not a man in England who does not cry out on him as the Queen’s ruin.”

All were executed except two: Lord Robert who was pardoned by the intercession of Philip II of Spain and the other conspirator, Elizabeth the Princess. Mary could not bring herself to be the instrument of death for her half-sister.

The Plot to Murder the Wife of Robert Dudley: Elizabeth I became Queen upon the death of Mary in 1558 and the most important business immediate to the Court was to see Elizabeth married to produce an heir to the throne. This was politically important to many who sought to have the particular consort who would benefit them the most. For many people outside the Court, it was equally important for them to have the Queen marry thereby creating an almost equal number of household posts, influential and powerful positions from pages to Chamberlains for the consort whoever he may be, and after that, even more positions to be created when the royal children were born.

Elizabeth reduced the number of close advisers to twenty from Mary’s thirty. She tactfully rejected marriage with any number of foreign suitors including Phillip II of Spain, the widower of her sister Mary. To contrast the Court of the new Queen with the previous Court of Mary, many preferred Elizabeth to marry an Englishman. There had never been an unmarried monarch of England and no one believed that she would remain single for long. She soon named Lord Robert Dudley as her Master of the Horse, a position very close to the Queen, and court gossip soon began that the Queen intended to marry her Master of the Horse, but Robert had been married since he was seventeen to Amy Robsart. Amy was never sent to the Tower and she had faithfully governed Robert’s business affairs while he was imprisoned. Amy, Robert and Elizabeth were in age within one year of each other.

By intercepting mail, making arrests, and by making unfounded charges, he created fear among the Council members who did not know of his devious actions, and when the Council met, Cecil made the motion that anyone voting that day for the meeting with the Nuncio which was necessary for the marriage would be declared ‘guilty of treason’. Sir Nicholas Bacon who seconded the motion, wrote: “By this one word, ‘treason’, he brought it about that, though many wished the Nuncio should be heard, he was in fact refused by the common vote of all”.

Some details of this event were to be similarly repeated seven years later in another mystery plot that involved Elizabeth, the murder of Mary Queen of the Scots’ husband, Henry Lord Darnley.Elizabeth’s plan to marry Robert Dudley went all agley and with it her attempt to free herself from what she called ‘the tyranny of Cecil’ failed. With Cecil’s knowledge of the facts, he had forever the information that would tie Elizabeth to his wishes. He thwarted her marriage to Dudley by depriving them of the support of Philip of Spain. A meeting with the Papal Nuncio on the Thames was arranged for St. Georges Day, April 23, 1561 and then a celebration would announce the marriage, but William Cecil was already at work planning on a series of events whereby he would control the Queen and the country for the rest of the century.

He used the strategy of invented ‘plots’ and if he were not the inventor of that ploy, he became the practiced master of the art. If he could reveal a plot against either the Queen or Protestantism, and he was always strangely successful at the precise moment to reveal a plot, then he held the power of the State that included the career of Robert Dudley and the Queen herself for the rest of their lives.

The meeting on the Thames never took place and, thereby, Cecil cut off any support for the marriage from Spain. No one, Dudley, Cecil or the Queen herself, ever voiced a denial that Am y Robsart was murdered, and by the way the Queen had been heard to speak, it was impossible to consider her innocent. The real power in England for the next half-century, held by William Cecil and then by his son Robert Cecil, began in the Queen’s conversation with the Spanish ambassador on the day before Amy was found in the dark at the foot of the stairs.

William Cecil outlined his method in writing: “The Way is full of Crooks. I found my Lord Marquis (Winchester) my Lord Keeper (Sir Nicholas Bacon) and my Lord Pembroke in this Matter my best Pillars. Yet I was forced to seek Byways... by discovering of certain Mass mongers and punishing them...I find it hath done much Good.”

Under Unseen Witness

MEASURE FOR MEASURE Robert J. Meyer

‘Measure for Measure’ presents some interesting background information. The year of writing is not known so scholars had to find external and internal clues as to the date which is generally taken as 1604. The writer of the ‘Introduction’ to ‘Measure’ in the Stratford Shakespeare Series feels ‘quite confident’ that the play ‘had not been produced’ by the year 1598 and he reasons that “from the omission of it from the enumeration of its author’s works in Meres’ Palladis Tamia’” as if Meres had kept track of all of the plays that were staged in London for the 25 years or more before he compiled his lists at the age of thirty. Since there were no playbills printed crediting the author, how would anyone collect such full information ? The theatre diary of Philip Henslowe does not list the author’s name for every play presented. It does not seem to occur to these many commentators that Francis Meres did not claim to have written a complete catalogue of English works nor did he state where he found his information, nor did he vouch for its accuracy. He was giving only some examples of English literary accomplishments to support his argument that they compared favourably with the ancient Greek and Roman writers in all of the categories that he lists.

The writer in the Stratford Series then states: “that [it] was produced before 1604, we know from an entry in the accounts of the Revels at Court from October, 1604, to October, 1605, in the following words: “By his Ma ties Plaiers. On St. Stivens night in the Hall, a Play called ‘Mesur for Mesur’”.Thisis followed by an editor’s comment in brackets: “(This entry is generally admitted to be a forgery, though based on authentic information. The metrical tests also place the play about the time of Hamlet) ” The writer continues: “In a column of the account devoted to ‘The Poets which mayd the Plaies,’ the name of a ‘Mr. Shaxberd’, apparently not so well known then as it is now, is entered.”

If this play was produced in 1604, ‘about the time of Hamlet’, this is the time that William is claimed to be ‘at the height of his fame’, yet he is ‘apparently not so well known then’ as now, apparently not, but was he not known any better then than as ‘Shaxberd’ ? The name on only some Quartos identified the name always as ‘William Shake speare’.

This listing of ‘Shaxberd’ is not a singular error or accidental spelling. It is far from any of the spellings of William of Stratford’s name where all of his relatives were known by a spelling that was always pronounced as ‘Shaxper’ in any written notes or documents This listing is in the official accounts of the Revels at Court and plainly and legibly drawn by hand in printed letters.

In another account of Court performances, the Revel’s list, in three line separated columns, the plays were performed at Court from Twelfth Night through Candelmas to ‘Shrousday’. Before each day’s entry, the written words are: “By his Ma-ties Plaiers” which would indicate a date of 1604 or later in James the First’s reign. The entries in the middle column read:

It would seem that no one has examined his list to check on the validity of his statements with regards to any of the other works that he ascribes to authors whose names are completely unknown in the present and perhaps unknown to scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What if it were discerned that Meres found the vast majority of the works in various book-lists of printers or merchants and that they had no association with works that were not in print at that time ? Who in all those centuries would ever pick up Meres’ Palladis Tamia had not someone, desperately looking for any trace of the name ‘Shakespeare’, found it within its 660 pages. There is no reason to believe that Meres was any more familiar with ‘Love’s Labore Wonne’ than with the work of the most little known writer that he mentions.

“On the 7 of January . . played the play of Henry the fift.

On Shrousunday: A play of the Martchant of Venis.

In the third column under the heading, ‘The poete’, only two entries are listed, for each of the performances of ‘the Martchant of Venis’. The neatly drawn word in printed letters is ‘Shaxberd’.

On Shroumonday: A Tragedye of the Spanishe Maz On Shroutuesday” A play Cauled The Martchant of Venis Againe. Comanded by the Kings Ma tie”

The 8 of January: A play Cauled Every on out of his Umor. On Candelmas Night: A play Every on In his Umor.

MEMOIRS OF WILLIAM Robert J. Meyer

William Shacksper of Stratford was 29 by the time the name ‘Shakespeare’ first appeared on a printed work in 1593, and since all biographers have imagined that the Man from Stratford was the author of the 36 plays published in 1623 as the work of ‘William Shakespeare’, they cannot account for silence in the records in the life of William and they try to invent what this man was doing from the age of 23 in 1587 to the year 1593 and then they claim that ‘no doubt’ this is the path his ‘career’ must have taken. This biographer begins by saying: “It would have been strange indeed almost unprecedented, if a young adventurer going up to London had immediately found his true place, and taken root therein.”

conclusion that all biographers wish without any documented evidence that William was an actor or a member of any acting company, and this biographer would know the vacancies of what he writes. James Burbadge was the owner of the company and of the theatre building in Shoreditch called the Theatre. His company was under the patronage of a series of patrons the first of which was Lord Strange and so the company was ‘Lord Strange, his servants’. When Lord Strange became the Earl of Derby, the company was known for a short time as ‘The Earl of Derby’s Men’ until his death in 1594 when the patronage was taken over by Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain. The company never was known as ‘Leicester’s Men’ but James Burbadge could have been a member of that company in his youth.

These companies were privately owned and operated by individual actors or producers but the companies required patronage by a nobleman of at least the rank of a Baron. The companies were never owned or paid by the patron, but they were considered ‘his servants’ and sometimes the members wore the nobleman’s colour and livery. To say that the “Burbadges, father and son” were prominent members’ of the company is misleading and incomplete. The ‘father and son’ were James and Cuthbert, not son Richard at the time of the taking over of patronage by Lord Hunsdon in 1594, and they were the sole owners, not ‘prominent members’

In the ‘Memoirs of W. S.’ published in Volume 18 of ‘The Stratford Shakespeare The Complete Works’, 1950, the unidentified author relates on Page 54, the coming of William to London. The tone of these pages is the tone of the biographies that were written of William, when this work was written in the late 1900’s.

Christopher Marlowe came to London in May of 1587 at the age of 23 and had his first play produced at the Rose theatre by Phillip Henslowe, and had taken root there writing plays as he intended when leaving Cambridge University with at least one play ready to be staged and he had others produced until his ‘death’ in 1593. Richard Field as a 16 year old graduate of free school in Stratford came directly to London and became an apprentice printer, the ‘true place’ in which he steadily advanced until becoming a Master at his trade and remaining there long after William of Stratford had died. Richard Burbadge, Ned Alleyne and many other leading actors of that day became actors at an early age and spent their entire life at that one occupation as did the playwrights Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene, and others in the long list of English playwrights before 1600. William was unusual in not immediately finding his ‘true place’ in coming to London. “But little as we know of Shakespeare’s period of trial and vicissitude, we do know that it was brief, and that within about three years from the time when he left his native place he attached himself to the Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon’s company (previously known as the Earl of Leicester’s), of which the Burbadges, father and son, were prominent members, and that he became a shareholder in this company, and remained an acting member of it until he finally retired to ThisStratford.”isonlythe

No one named ‘Shakespeare’ was a member of any company. No one ‘attaches himself’ to an acting group as all must demonstrate that they can do something, act, sew costumes, or prompt in rehearsals. William’s ‘attachment’ was listed in a paper found to be a forgery of the early 19th century perpetrated to provide evidence that he was ‘a member’ and a ‘shareholder’, evidence that otherwise was totally lacking and still is non existent “Shakespeare immediately showed that unmistakeable trait of a man organized for success in life, which is so frequently lacking in men who are both gifted and industrious, the ability to find work, and to settle down quickly to it, and take hold of it in earnest.”

“He worked hard, did every thing that he could turn his hand to, acted, wrote, helped others to write, and seeing through men and things as he did at a glance, he was in those early years somewhat over free of his criticism and his advice, and, what was less endurable by his rivals to ready to illustrate his principles of art successfully in practice.”

These duties are in question, as all of them are of conjecture as there is no evidence that ‘he helped others to write’. William of Stratford never took the time or effort to teach his daughter to write as he is not known to have written anything except his name and most of those are scrawled on his will. The actor, Robert Armin, also wrote plays. Richard Burbadge was a portrait painter. Other actors were singers or dancers and most of the actors and many of the dramatists did everything they could ‘turn a hand to’ and there is far less likelihood that William could do what most of these men did for certain with their work. This ascribed ability of ‘seeing through men and things’ often arises when biographers look into the Plays for any evidence of his having an ‘all perceiving intuition’ into the minds of men of all classes, kings or shop keepers. Ben Jonson saw no great gift of psychologist or philosopher in whom he never called ‘William’. He felt that much of what William said in the writings was ‘full of wind’.

Evidence that men who were gifted and industrious did not lack organization for success in life is in the list of tradesmen and writers of the time including Richard Field, the Stratford lad of 16 who found his success at printing in London. Even Stratford had its Richard Quiney and Thomas Greene who well accomplished at a far younger age than thirty. There is no evidence that William ever found work other than possibly at his father’s glove shop and there is no evidence of anyone in Stratford saying that William ever witnessed a play on stage. William was an excellent investor and moneylender in his quest to produce more money than any man in Stratford’s short history.

This author betrays his dogmatic pronouncements of the 19th century, the wish to believe in Horatio Alger stories of the poor boy without a penny becoming the manager of the company by way of steady workaday diligence and picking up stray paper from the floor. This argument is proffered as every biographer knows that William of Stratford had no trade or occupation, had no education beyond not graduating from free school, had no books in the house and made no effort to be able to read or write. Without any evidence that William had even the interest in town affairs that his father had in the council, some great quality of character must be imagined for him to attain what they believe he had to attain to write those 36 plays that ‘someone’ who is unknown said that he had written as stated in the 1632 Folio. If William was ‘organized for success in life’, it was not evident when he left free school before the usual age of 16 or when he made a great blunder in his marriage to Anne. He never read books, never took up a pen to write a poesy and so the biographers have to make up his missing 16 years of unproductive living with Horatio Alger allegories for this man who had demonstrated no interest in any particular vocation. This author does not dare to give even one example of a ‘gifted and industrious’ man who was not ‘organized for success’, but William never was one ‘to find work and settle down quickly to it’ in these 16 missing years.

This may impress someone who has never read the paragraph from ‘Groatsworth’ and it must be the biographer’s hope that no one does read it as his statements are deeply flawed. It is not known when Stratford William first ‘came to London’, and there is no evidence that William ever worked ‘as a youthful assistant’ to Greene in an acting company or otherwise. In the spurious fiction that was the ‘Blackfriars’ document, sixteen ‘players’ are named as working together in November 1589 including Thomas Greene but not Robert Greene.

The phrase ‘at a glance’ is a reminder of the legend of ‘William being able to tell ‘at a glance’ that Jonson’s first play had merit although there is no reason ever given when William is supposed to have even looked at it after it was rejected by someone in ‘the company’. No facts, please, we are Shakespeareophiles. There is also no evidence that William ever criticized anyone unless the author is referring to Hamlet’s censure of the Players on over acting, but this is Hamlet, not the author. He had no ‘rivals’. No one is on record as saying that he was ‘less endurable’. What were his ‘principles of art’ as other biographers rejoice saying that he didn’t have ‘principles of art’ that applied to the ready made but that he improvised as he overtook problems. The next sentence telegraphs a later message in three chosen words, ‘factotum’, ‘conceited’, and ‘upstart’. “He came soon to be regarded, by those who liked and needed him as a most useful and excellent fellow, a very factotum, and a man of great promise; while those who disliked him and found him in their way, and whose ears were wounded by his praises, set him down as an officious and conceited upstart.”

All biographers are describing two distinct entities at the same time, the ‘great poet’ or whoever wrote the Plays of whom nothing whatever is known and the Man from Stratford about whom definite but limited information is known through Stratford town records. Since nothing is known of the writer or writers of the original play scripts, the printed Quarto versions, or the final Folio versions of the Plays, everything stated by the biographers must be sheer invention but when their statements are applied to Stratford William much of what is imagined becomes ludicrous as it conflicts with what is definitely known of the man with the ‘similar’ name.

“One of the play wrights whom he found in high favour when he reached London, and with whom, as a youthful assistant, he began his dramatic labours, stretched out his hand from beyond the grave to leave a record of his hate for the man who had supplanted him, and who, he saw, would supplant his companions, as a writer for the stage.”

Stratford William was liked by everyone who set down upon paper any opinion of him, an ‘excellent’ fellow, yes; useful, yes, to Quiney and Sturley who asked to borrow money from him or engaged him in investments in property and articles. No one disliked him, no discouraging word written anywhere and that was his greatest asset. ‘Factotum’, no, as this biographer is using the word in its 19th century sense, but ‘factotum’ is not a noun to those in 1593 as they were well schooled in Latin. Young Richard Field would say that ‘fac’ meant ‘to do’ or ‘to work’ and ‘facere’ meant ‘to make’ as in ‘factory’ and ‘totum’ is ‘total’ or ‘all’ and the noun used by Greene and others of that age is ‘Johannes’ or John that became ‘Jack of all trades’, he who could ‘do’ ‘all’ works. All those at Stratford who knew their William never acknowledged that he was ever on a stage, much less had held a pen to paper. No one registered jealousy for any praise of William and no one set him down as either ‘officious’ or as an ‘upstart’

Of course this biographer is referring to someone in London, not to William of Stratford. He is reflecting Greene’s ‘Groatsworth’ that contained those three words, ‘upstart’ ‘fac totum’ and ‘conceit’ but there is no love for Greene to be found in this quoted biography.

Greene had just written several of his best books that same year so if being a drunken debauchee was the cause, William should have ordered at least a carton of his favourite wine. Being ‘in need’ is considered ‘dishonourable’ but this may only further indicate that William of Stratford was not the ‘great poet’ as he was never ‘in need’ in his ‘thirties’. Greene did not ‘leave behind’ his papers, but asked his friend, Chettle, to see that they were published. Greene was ill but ‘Groatsworth’ was written long before he was ‘on his deathbed’.

The biographer is more than mistaken if this is his reference. Contrary to the implication here, William was barely four years younger than Greene. He would have been a fairly old ‘young assistant’ at 29. The melodramatic ‘stretched his hand out from beyond the grave’ is unnecessary. No one described Samuel Pepys as stretching his hand out from beyond the grave to tell about the London fire. Printed ‘posthumously’ would have sufficed.

“But Greene, though repentant, with the repentance of sordid souls when they are cast down, was not so changed in heart that he could resist the temptation of discharging from his stiffening hand a Parthian shaft barbed with envy and malice and winged with a little wit, against youngGreeneShakespeare.”wrotenot a word of repentance as he was not repentant of what he saw of the fate of playwrights, thus his warning to his fellows but this biographer reveals more of his 20th century self satisfaction than he informs about Greene. He pours out more vindictiveness with his ‘sordid souls’, ‘cast down’, ‘temptation’, and the ‘stiffening hand’, rigour mortis taking over Greene’s still writing fingers to throw a ‘Parthian shaft’. Why does he provide this erudite eructation ? Why, of course, a Spear for young Shakeshaft. He is still ‘young’.

“Greene was right, as his surviving friends ere long discovered. Their sun had set; and it was well for them that they all died soon after. They could not forgive Shakespeare his superiority; but he forgave one of them at least his envy; for when, a few years after, he wrote As you Like it, he made Phebe say of Marlowe, quoting a line from Hero and Leander.” (III, v.81 82) “Dead Shepherd ! now I find thy saw of might; Who ever lov’d that lov’d not at first sight.” [The last line is in italics] There is no limit to the extent of assumption in the absence of evidence. None of these men, Greene, Nashe, Marlowe, Kyd or Peele ever knew a William Shacksper nor did ‘he’ know them. By the time the name Shake speare’ was first seen in public print after 1594, both Greene and Marlowe were dead and so in 1592 there was no ‘Shakespeare’ name in print to be known in London and so no superiority was present to forgive.

In the play, ‘As you Like It’, there are these two lines to be spoken by the character Phebe who is a shepherdess. The last line in this two line phrase and in italics is a line from Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander’. The biographer uses these two lines to support his contention that William purposely put into Phebe’s mouth the words, ‘Dead Shepherd’ because Marlowe was dead at the writing of the play, but he was ‘dead’ by the fall of 1593. The biographer omits mentions that this speech is directly preceded by the speech of Rosalind to Phebe in the presence of two shepherds, Corin and Silvius. Rosalind says, “Pray you do not fall in love with me for I am falser than vows made in wine, besides I like you not.” Celia, a first cousin to Rosalind is also present. Rosalind then says, “Will you go sister ? Shepherd, ply her hard. Come sister.” Then Rosalind, Celia and the shepherd Corin leave and Phebe and Silvius are alone. [Act III, Sc V]

“The drunken debauchee, Robert Greene, dying in dishonourable need, left behind him a pamphlet written on his death bed, and published after his burial.”

The biographer, in writing of William’s early life in Stratford, tells of a ‘traditional’ ‘motive for leaving home’, and picking up what ‘Betterton heard’ and what Rowe relates from hearing it from Betterton, continues for more than seven printed pages, P37 44, elaborating on the ‘deer stealing’ story and how Sir Thomas Lucy ‘had him oft whipt and sometimes imprisoned’, a fictitious incident, that, if true, would have appeared in the official records of arrests in Stratford.

This is when Phebe says ‘Dead Shepherd’ but the biographer claims that the author in the midst of his tender scene says a hurried farewell to Christopher Marlowe because she says, “Now I find thy saw of might”, then quotes a line of Marlowe quite out of place, forget that she is but a simple shepherdess speaking to a shepherd and that they will continue to speak of the extent of their love to the end of the scene. Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander’ was left unfinished in 1593 and one line from it has become an ‘adage’, an ‘old saw’, ‘Who ever lov’d that lov’d not at first sight?’. A ‘saw’ is defined as ‘the whole tenor of any discourse’. The biographer wishes to continue with his vituperation of Robert Greene: “Greene sank into his grave, his soul eaten up with envy as his body with disease; but he was spared the added pang of foreseeing that his own name would be preserved in the world’s memory only because of his indirect connection with the man at whom he sneered and that he would be chiefly known as his slanderer.”

All of this peculiar fame of Robert Greene in biographies of ‘W. S.’ is the result of someone trying to find a printed reference to the ‘great poet’ as his history was still a blank page and because he and all of these biographers could not read the clear words of either Greene or Chettle. There was no envy. There was no Shakespeare on the stage for Greene to hear. The ‘upstart Crow’ was but an un named player who strutted his hour, made his scene shake with his bombast and then was heard no more. No one reads Robert Greene’s plays, nor those of Kyd, or Nashe, and it is probable that no one would read or see upon the stage today those 36 plays if they had not been printed in an revised form in 1623 and given an author’s name and no more. They could well have been forgotten if it were not for a god father who on his occasional journeys between London and Stratford stopped off at an Oxen tavern and so impressed the inn keeper’s son by dandying him upon his knee that the boy imagined him to be the unknown ‘great poet’ as he lived in Stratford, and when he himself became a playwright, he rewrote some of the ‘god father’s’ plays and brought them to his London stage instilling in the public an interest in the previously unperformed, unread and forgotten plays of the impresario’s ‘father’. From the rebirth of the ‘great poet’ through Sir William Davenant, the legend of William took a life of its own through all the biographers who have amassed volumes of rodomontade, all brought to full flower by the most adept forgers of the 18th century and a long list of 19th and 20thcentury biographers who ignored that the statements were proven to be spurious but their contents survive as “genuine” in countless accounts of the ‘Life of the Great Poet’, leading their readers to fall into ‘a quicksand of deceit’. “O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath.”

This biographer also has difficulty in understanding the method of wooing a patron in Elizabethan times. As one who also believes that William came to town already having written ‘Venus and Adonis’ he says: “With Venus and Adonis written, if nothing else, but I think it not unlikely a play, Shakespeare went to London and sought a patron. For in those days a poet needed a patron even more that a publisher; as without the former he rarely or never got the latter.”

If a patron were sought by writing a poem, as many of the writers did, the writer needed to have it published for sale and to include a printed page with a Dedication to the proposed patron. Without a ‘publisher’ or a printer, there would be no booklet to dedicate and no patron.

Almost as much space is provided to the conjecture that William found employment in a law office. Legal phrases are plentiful in the Plays, therefore William must have spent some years at the trade to account for the exactness in the use of the phraseology, as if he could not have picked up his legal vocabulary by attending courts of law. It is never suggested that anyone could read a book on the subject or, if not available, ask a lawyer when in doubt, otherwise it would be a long apprenticeship to be a writer of a variety of subjects. By the same faulty reasoning some biographers have imagined him as a sailor or a visitor to Italy for him to write his Italian plays that were rewritten accounts in blank verse of much older stories. Only one Play is claimed to be an original invention.

There were attempts to relate a second stanza but these appeared in the middle of the 18th century and by that time, there were several versions of the first.

Then there is a Mr Thomas Jones, who is supposed to have been ninety when he died in 1703. He remembered the deer stealing story too. Of course, he would have been 10 years old in 1623 when he heard the story ‘from old people at Stratford’. Jones is supposed to have written down the first stanza of a ballad that William is to have written and ‘stuck upon the park gate’ of Lucy. Capell tells of this because he received it from his grandfather who had it from Jones.

An astonishing number of people through the years are named as having known of this incident when they remember or mention nothing else about William as a youth. The Reverend William Fulman noted this in his manuscript biographical memorandums that he bequeathed to the Reverend Richard Davies, rector of Sapperton in Gloucestershire and Archdeacon of Lichfield.Davies

‘made brief additions’ in relating how William was ‘much given to all unluckinesse in stealing venison and rabbits from Sr Lucy, who had him of whipt [etc]”. Davies died in 1708. William Fulman died in 1688 and had written in his notes barely more than William’s birth, death and occupation. Davies then added the reason for William’s flying ‘his native country, to his great advancement’ which he could have heard from Betterton. This biographer puts Betteron’s ‘visit’ to Warwickshire at 1675 which would have been 34 years before Rowe printed his material in the ‘Life and Works’, a long time for such a meagre amount of information to be lying about that could not have filled a scrap of paper.

William Oldys, another antiquarian, heard of the deer-stealing story from ‘a very old man living near Stratford’, and the nine line stanza of the ballad is given by both Oldys and Capell exactly word for word with the exception of Capell’s version having the addition of a ‘O’ in the last line. Yet, no two people related the four line ditty on William’s floor grave in nearly the same words, while copying it down in person while standing or crouching above it.

All manner of excuses is forwarded by biographers. Since William played the Ghost in ‘Hamlet’ or perhaps Adam in ‘As You Like It’ as suggested by William Oldys’ fable about William’s younger brother living “to a great age”, although he died before William, “it is consistent with all that we know of him”, which is almost nothing, “that he should play such parts as this and the Ghost, which required judgment and intelligent reading rather than passion and lively simulation”. Was Richard Burbadge’s portrayal of Hamlet ‘a lively simulation’ ?

The biographer explains why William is supposed to have given up acting “When he had found that he could labour profitably in a less public walk of his calling…” Was this profitable labour writing plays that brought him five to ten pounds apiece with no royalty or did William of Stratford profitably labour by lending money at ‘ten in the hundred’ at London’s stocks market?

An author mourns the news that his beloved group of ‘inhabitants of Sowtherk as have complained’ are the spurious creation of Mr Collier.

Even in myth, the author imagines more myth. If William lived in Southwark during July of 1596, the date upon this forged paper, there would be no reason for neighbours to watch him with curiosity as he went in and out any more than to watch hundreds of others in that crowded community as no one would know who he was or what he did if anything as he would certainly not be on his way to and from the Blackfriars as that was far across and up the river and not in operation as a theatre in 1596. There would be no reason for William to live on the Southwark if were not employed at a theatre. The author ignores that the Theatre of the Burbadges was in Shoreditch outside the east wall of London, and the Rose was even nearby in Southwark, as he is influenced by the other forgery stating that ‘W.S.’ was a sharer and a member of the ‘Blackfriars Theatre’ in 1596 and forged to supply the missing data that William was established as a player in London long before that date. Any London historian would know that there were only performances by young boys at the Blackfriars building before 1600, favoured by Elizabeth.

This biographer then quotes the “inhabitantes of Sowtherk as have complained, this of July, 1596” ‘document’ that lists the names of Mr. Tupin, Mr. Langorth, Mr. Shaksper and others but this was one of J.P. Collier’s forgeries that he produced at least 18 years after Malone died ! However, Collier introduced the letter as being the long, lost paper to which Malone referred, the ‘paper now before me’. Malone also said that it “formally belonged to Edward Alleyn, the player”, so how would the actor of Marlowe’s plays come into possession of a municipal ‘document’ or ‘list’ of complaints from Southwark, and why would he consider it of importance to keep ? It is implied that Alleyn kept it in his Dulwich College archives and that the paper was returned there after Malone died in 1812. Collier’s false claim that the paper was the one that Malone possessed is hardly reason for the biographer to repeat the claim as the forgery was exposed by 1860 and this biographer would have known this or should have known it.

“I cannot easily believer that such a genuine seeming glimpse of real life is artificial; and I am loath to lose those neighbours…who watched with curiosity the handsome player poet as he went in and out on his way to and from the Blackfriars.” “I mourn the vanishing Nagges… and am injured at the assertion that Mother Golden Mrs. Quickly in the flesh and plenty of it is a myth.”“Ah that deceit should steal such gentle shapes.”

The ‘Memoir of W.S.’ biographer says of Malone’s statement: “He gives us no further insight into the contents of the paper but he probably referred to a small slip, borrowed, with other relics of a like kind, from Dulwich College, many of which were returned after his death.”

This is another example of how a later writer takes any statement about William and ascribes it as being known by someone of a by gone era when he himself does not know its true history or he does know and ignores it. If all of the biographers omitted all of the forgeries and the claims made in those forgeries and did not invent further accomplishments that ‘no doubt, he did this, and most probably he did that’, the biographies would be as limited as the scrap of paper with which they began in 1680.

Most statements that William was residing in Southwark in 1596 originate and depend upon the word of Edmund Malone, who, in his ‘Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Papers’, before 1812, discusses the forgeries of William Ireland in the nineteenth century. He wrote: “From a paper now before me, which formerly belonged to Edward Alleyn, the player, our poet appears to have lived in Southwark, near the Bear garden, in 1596.”

The biographer, when the proper time comes, would show that fictitious people continued to live there.

Edmund Malone, then, was not referring to the Collier forgery as that was formed after 1812, but he does not say on which premise he concludes that William was living in Southwark in 1596. It is unlikely that Malone is referring to the ‘Francis Langley-William Wayte’ writs of surety issued in the winter of 1596 that named, a ‘William Shaksper’ and concerned the Swan Theatre as those writs were not discovered until 1930. Even if Malone did know of them in 1800, it need not imply that William lived in Southwark to have invested in the Swan Theatre. To what, then was Malone referring ?

This biographer makes no mention of the ‘tearing down’ of the Theatre in Shoreditch. He does state that the Lord Chamberlain his servants played at the Blackfriars in 1596 as he gives full credence to the ‘document’ in which William’s name along with those of seven actors including ‘Richard Burbage’ are mentioned in a petition stating that ‘in the summer season your petitioners are able to play at their new built house on the Bankside caulde the Globe’ and that ‘in the winter they are completed to come to the Blackfriars’. This ‘certificate’ was found to be a fabrication of John Payne Collier that was printed in his ‘History of English Dramatic Poetry’ of 1831, and also printed in a later edition that was left unchallenged in 1879. It was professed to be an answer to a genuine petition of the inhabitants of the ‘Blackfriars Close’ dated 1596 but which Collier listed in his book as being dated 1576. This demonstrates how little regard for authenticity was blatantly exhibited in the middle 19th century. The discrepancy in the dates went unnoticed for almost 30 years and the revelation of the forgery in 1860 was disregarded by publishing them again in 1879.

These forged fictions supplied the biographers of the late 19th century with hefty material to elaborate at great length as in the writing about the ‘Inhabitantes of Sowtherk 1596’ forgery, the biographer says: “It is impossible to understand more, than that Shakespeare and other inhabitants of Southwark had made some complaint in July 1596, which, we may guess, was hostile to the wishes of the writer, who congratulated himself that the matter was so well at an end. Some parties named, including our great dramatist, continued resident in Southwark long afterwards, as we shall have occasion in its proper place to show, the writer seems to have been desirous of speaking derogatorily of all the persons he enumerates.”

Over the centuries there have been at least two dates considered as being the year in which the Globe Theatre was built. Most writers today place the date as December 1598 when the building of the Globe began along with the dismantling of the ‘Theatre’ in Shoreditch. Hesketh Pearson (P79) says: “On December 26th, ’98, twelve of them descended upon Shoreditch…” and “On January 20th, ’99, they revisited Shoreditch and carted off the rest of the material.” The ‘Memoir’ biographer says in his Chapter ix: “Venus and Adonis was published in 1593; and it was on the 22nd December in that year that Richard Burbage, the great actor, signed a bond to a carpenter of the name of Peter Street for the construction of the Globe.” In his Chapter x, he says: “We have concluded, as we think that we may do very fairly, that the construction of the new theatre on the Bankside, subsequently known as the Globe, having been commenced soon after the signature of the bond of Burbage to Street, on 22nd Dec., 1593, was continued through the year 1594: we apprehend that it would be finished and ready for the reception of audiences early in the spring of 1595.”

Even this complaint overstates the offensiveness of the instruments as most gentlemen carried swords and most others of lower rank had daggers on their persons as was the custom. The ‘axes’ were for dismantling the building as were the ‘bills’ that are wooden staffs with attached blades. None was brought to the site for offensive purposes and none was unlawful to carry. Another exaggeration in the complaint is the statement that Cuthbert Burbadge unlawfully combined and ‘federated himself with’ his brother into a ‘confederacy’. The only purpose of biographers for including this incident is to claim that William was present and took part in the razing of the Theatre.

This incident, as related by biographer Robert Payne, is both elucidated and obfuscated. On page 192 of his 1980 book a quotation from the original complaint addressed to the Privy Council exactly describes in legal terms the attempt ‘to pull down’ the Theatre. The lawyer who drew up the complaint was intent on impressing the council on behalf of his client, Giles Alleyn, the ground landlord. A single sentence reads: “The said Cuthbert Burbage, having intelligence of your subject’s purpose herein, and unlawfully combining and federating himself with the said Richard Burbage and one Peter Street, William Smith and divers other persons to the number of twelve, to your subjects unknown, did about the eight and twentieth day of December, in the one and fortieth year of your highness’ reign and since your highness’ last and general pardon, by the confederacy aforesaid, riotously assembled themselves together, and then and there armed themselves with divers and many unlawful and offensive weapons, as namely swords, daggers, bills, axes, and such like, and so armed did then repair unto the said Theatre, and then and there armed as aforesaid, in very riotous, outrageous, and forcible manner, and contrary to the laws of your highness’ realm, attempted to pull down the said Theatre.”

From this it is finally learned that the date of the excursion to Shoreditch was December 28 and not the 26th; that there were 16 persons who went to Shoreditch and not twelve as Pearson also states; and that William was not one of those present as claimed by most biographers, since the complaint names the first four persons, and the remaining twelve were ‘divers other persons to your subjects unknown’. Although the 16 persons are prejudiciously described as having ‘armed themselves’ with ‘unlawful and defensive weapons’ those instruments were ‘namely swords, daggers, bills, axes’, not battleaxes as Pearson states.

Collier’s forgery was conceived in 1831 on the understanding that the Globe was in existence in 1596 as “it professes to be an answer to a remonstrance by thirty inhabitants of the Liberty of Blackfriars”, ‘some of them of honour’, against the repairing and enlarging “of the Blackfriars Theatre”. This is supposedly dated 1596. This petition was answered by a genuine document dated ‘3 of Maie, 1596’, stating that the theatre could be repaired “butt not to make the same Bothlarger”.versions of the circumstance in the building of the Globe and both building dates have enjoyed wide circulation in published biographies and each version has had a life of 75 to 100 or more years. Which is the true date ? Both documents are dated in late December, the signed bond on December 22, 1593 and the complaint stating the date as December 26, 1598. The ‘3’ and the ‘8’ are each easily mistaken for the other in some handwriting. Did someone construct the ‘plucking down’ story and include the name of the carpenter, Peter Street, as director of the operation, taking his name from the bond signed on December 22, 1593, thereby adding ‘authenticity’ to a false story or did the original recorder of the 1593 bond mistake an eight for a three and others repeated the error just as these other obvious errors of impossibility have been constantly repeated or are both dates correct and the dismantling of the Theatre and the building of the Globe two separate events five years apart ?

Even Robert Payne who includes this part of the complaint that does not mention William, still includes him by saying, “Shakespeare and the other actors were certainly present and lent a helping hand” adding that the 16 men, as definitely stated in the compliant, “were not the only ones involved for in addition there were carters, carriers and boatmen”. Even in the presence of documented evidence, any amount of additional elaboration contrary to that evidence is exercised. It can only be assumed that the 16 men did not do their own carting, carrying and ‘boating’, if the bulky beams were actually ‘boated’ over the Thames. This shows addition ignorance of the later biographers about of the conditions of Elizabethan England. The Thames River, pronounced ‘Thamze’, froze over in each winter and this is probably why the Burbadges chose to dismantle the Theatre in late December or early January when the timbers could be horse drawn on sleds across the ice from point to point without precariously loading them onto and unloading them from boats. The boats regularly used for ferrying passengers would hardly be depended upon for hire to transport the huge beams from the building. Not only the entire wooden structure of the Theatre had to be moved, beams, walls, stage and possibly some stone work as the Rose theatre had extensive stone foundations, but the entire contents had to be moved, an extensive wardrobe, stage properties, books, play manuscripts and business records. Having acknowledged this, Payne adds an entirely new route for the transportation. (P.194)

Was the Globe operational in 1596 and then enlarged with this material in 1599 ? If the Globe was anywhere near the size of the existing Rose theatre at that time, it was much larger than the Theatre in Shoreditch that was ‘said to hold 2000 people’, The Rose, built in 1587, the foundations of which were partly uncovered in 1989 was discovered to be much larger than previously imagined and would have held 2400, and the material taken from the Shoreditch location would not have been sufficient to build the Globe.

Most modern accounts draw the conclusion, or being with the premise, that the Globe theatre was built with the timbers from the Shoreditch Theatre but is this necessarily correct ? The document of complaint describes and dates only the dismantling of the Theatre making no mention of what happened to the building material.

Each biographer has the same initial evidence, the documented complaint which each can examine and quote, yet, each relates different dates, people involved, routes taken and means of transportation, but they all have in common the firm statement that William was present and ‘certainly involved’ while providing proof that he was not and could not be there.

Robert Payne continues: P192.

“And the horse carts clearly did not travel across the City of London and across the London Bridge; to avoid tollgates and inspectors, they drove across Finsbury Fields and proceeded westward in sight of the city walls, and then when the city was safely passed, they would turn south, perhaps at the village of Charing Cross, where all the iron and timber would be transferred to boats.”Robert Payne, too, is unaware of the frozen Thames and so devises an unnecessary longer journey but still a dangerous boat trip. This route that would necessitate taking boats all the way back east on the river to Southwark near London Bridge, would be at least three to four times the distance of simply travelling south down Shoreditch Street and around Houndsditch remaining outside the city wall and across the ice to Southwark. Payne does not explain why it would be necessary to ‘avoid tollgates and inspectors’ and ‘safely passing the city’. These were supposed to be the Lord Chamberlain’s servants collecting their rightful property. Could tollgates be more expensive than hiring boatmen ? Nothing is mentioned here of the men returning on January 20th when they carted off the rest of the material on a second complete trip across the ice.

The lease on the land expired in March 1597, and Giles Alleyn refused to renew the lease, but the Burbadges didn’t dismantle the Theatre near that date, and a stipulation in James Burbadge’s lease with Giles Alleyn allowed that any building that Burbadge built on the site could be removed at any time during the term of the lease. When Alleyn refused to renew the lease, he may have made his claim to the building on the basis that it wasn’t removed while the lease was in effect, going strictly by the wording of the contract. It follows that he would not allow the Burbadges to use the Theatre since they no longer had a lease and Alleyn claimed ownership to the building.

“Much of the Theatre was simply reconstructed on a new site, for Peter Street is known to have been one of the most capable carpenters in London, and by numbering all the timbers, beams, joists, planks, and floorboards of the Theatre he would be able to reassemble into the Globe”.Numbering each beam, joist and plank would have slowed down the operation from the beginning, and although marking each beam is highly possible, it indicates how painfully difficult if not impossible it would be to do this if there had been violence or constant interference by the servants. Most of the descriptions of this operation have been on the assumption that there was no foundation already present on the Globe site in December 1598.

The servants made no violent resistance and the workers ‘forcibly’ went ahead with their job. There was no necessity for ‘posting some guards’, as Payne says happened, or was there any possibility of ‘tearing down the building’ quietly. There was no possibility that the entire building could be carried away before the landlord ‘would get wind of it’. The dismantling was interrupted with Peter Street being ‘temporarily lodged in gaol’ and the work had to be resumed the following month none of which Payne mentions but he says, “On the night of December 28, 1598, the Theatre died”. Most biographers assume that the move was made in a day.

Acknowledging that the complainant wished to impress the Council by repeating that the operation was ‘riotous’, the number of those involved, sixteen, must be correct as it is specific in the names and details, describing the twelve ‘others’ as ‘labourers such as wrought for wages’, not the exact description for actors. If there had been more who took an active part, the lawyer would have welcomed a much higher number in the complaint. He does not overlook identifying an onlooker, James Burbadge’s widow: “She did see the doing thereof, and like well of it”. The complaint never mentions any violence between the servants and the workers or that anyone was hurt, but that the “servants and farmers, then going about in peaceable manner to procure them to desist from that unlawful enterprise, they the said persons then and there forcibly and violently resisting your subjects, servants and farmers, but also then and there pulling, breaking and throwing down the said Theatre in very outrageous violent and riotous sort.”

“There must have been some violence, but he (the lawyer) may also have exaggerated the extent of it for legal purposes.” “They had planned to manoeuvre with great care, posted some guards around the building, and hoped to tear down the building as quietly as possible.” “They were tearing down a building and hoping to transport all its timbers and ironwork south of the Thames before Giles Alleyn would get wind of it.”

Earlier references to the Globe that made no reference to the dismantling of the Shoreditch Theatre, do mention that the Globe was operational in 1596. Even the forgeries drawn in the 1830’s indicate this was the recognized date at that time. All later references to the Shoreditch dismantling assume that the material was moved to begin construction of the Globe and do not delegate the material for enlarging the Globe.

Little of this seems logical or possible when considering all of the information.

This would have meant, if there had not been an operational Globe that the Burbadges would have been without a theatre for almost three years from March 1597 to early 1600 and nowhere is that ever mentioned in these biographers. Building a theatre from foundation to roof would have taken a full year by all estimates. On December 22, 1593, Peter Street signed a bond with the Burbadges to build the Globe. If the Globe was not operational in March 1597, why would the Burbadges not dismantle the Theatre in Shoreditch immediately upon being refused the renewal of the lease ? Once charges were made against Peter Street and he was gaoled, why did Giles Alleyn not confiscate the remainder of the building instead of allowing Street to remove it on the following January 20? The Burbadges, it seems more reasonable, collected the material when they did, when the landlord was absent in the middle of the winter to avoid a confrontation with him and probably to take advantage of the frozen river. Whey else would they pick December 28th to make their move ? They were not spurred by ‘promptitude’ or by the lack of a theatre.

FRANCIS MERES’ PALLADIS TAMIA 1598 Robert J. Meyer

“As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines: so Shakespeare among ye English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage: for Comedy, witness: Getleme of Verona, his Errors, his Loue Labor’s Lost, his Loue Labor’s wonne, his Midsummers night dreame, & his Merchant of Venice: for Tragedy his Richard the 2, Richard the 3, Henry the 4, King Iohn, Titus Andronicus and his Romeo and Iuliet.”

“The English tongue is mightily enriched and gorgeously invested in rare ornaments and resplendent habiliments, by Sidney, Spenser, Drayton, Warner, Shakespeare, Marlow and Chapman.”“Asthe soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagorus, so the sweet witty soul of Ovid lived in meliferous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, as witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among his private friends.”

“As Epicis Stolo said the Muses would speak with Plautus’s tongue if they would speak Latin, so I say that the Muses would speak with Shakespeare’s fine filed phrase if they would speakFrancisEnglish.”Meres was thirty years old when he published his ‘Palladis Tamia’; he lived in London and would later become a parson and a schoolmaster when he moved to a Rutlandshire parish. Until this book was printed in the autumn of 1598, only one Play was published with ‘W. Shakespere’ but not ‘written by’ on the title page: ‘Loue’s Labore Lost’. Four other plays were printed in quarto that did not contain any name: ‘Richard II’, ‘Richard III’, ‘Henry IV, Part I’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet’. The latter had printings in 1597, 1599 and 1600 but none of these quartos had any name as the author. Reprints of ‘Richard II’ and ‘Richard III’ did have William’s name on the title pages but they were printed after Meres had ‘assigned’ those plays to that name. Biographers have considered the entire 660 page book as a ‘quite worthless piece of edifying pedantry’. Biographer Quennell says, “Meres’ comparative discourse itself may be reckoned a piece of harmless pedantry, the awkward effort of an ambitious young man to set up as a learned critic; but it illustrates the dimensions of Shakespeare’s fame, and shows how securely he was now established” in 1598. How accurate is Meres ? He does not mention ‘Henry the VI, parts I, II, and III’ which are the very earliest of the plays dated at 1591 and 1592 that the biographers are insistent are William’s first plays. He credits ‘Loue’s Labore Wonne’ to William and that did not survive at least under that name so where does Meres find his information when there was not an author’s name on ‘Romeo’ or on some of the others before the1623 Folio which is long after the lifetimes of almost all contemporaries playwrights except Ben Jonson ? Meres cannot have read the titles on the quartos as there were no attributes on the title pages. Later biographers have used the excuse that ‘Loue’s Labore Wonne’ must have been another play before it was renamed by saying “It has been supposed since the time of Dr Farmer, to be ‘Alls Well that Ends Well’, under a different title, and when it was revived in 1605 or 1606 with additions and alterations, it received also a new appellation.” (Books Inc. ‘Life’, 1939) Yet others believe that ‘All’s Well’ to be written in 1602 As the biographer says, all of this ‘has been Thesesupposed’.paragraphs of Meres are the most quoted by the biographers but five further paragraphs also mention William’s name. The final four are comparisons of the best Greek, and Latin poets with the English poets at Meres’ time.

The earliest enumeration of the Plays appeared in a printed work by Francis Meres, called ‘Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury’, a small but thick volume of 660 pages in quarto besides ‘The Table’. Under the heading, ‘A comparative discourse of our English Poets, with the Greeks, Latine and Italian Poets’, Meres includes these paragraphs.

He divides these comparisons into four categories of poets: best lyric poets, best tragic poets, best poets for comedy and poets famous for elegy. All together he lists over 90 poets including such poets as Anaxadrides Rhodius, Licinius Imbrex, and Doctor Leg of Cambridge. It would seem that Meres merely copied down names from other lists for it is unlikely that he would search through bookstore shelves for these names and he certainly could not have read the works of 90 or more poets to ascertain who the best were in his estimation and in four categories in three languages. One biograph y, ‘Stratford Shakespear’, P74, says of this book:

Historians use this list and the year 1598 to date these and other plays depending upon whether Meres include the dates. ‘Much Ado’, therefore, is dated to 1598 or 1599 since it is not mentioned by Meres. Although they say that the entire book is 660 pages of ‘worthless pedantry’, they treat these few paragraphs about ‘W.S.’ that have no evidence of accuracy as if they were etched in tablets of jade. In 1590, before anyone attributed anything to William, there were ‘anonymous’ plays of the time: ‘The True tragedy of Richard III’, ‘The Troublesome Reign of King John’, ‘The famous Victories of Henry V’; and ‘King Leir’.

discourse makes no pretence to analysis or aesthetic judgement. Indeed, according to the modern standard, it can hardly be regarded as criticism, but it may be accepted as a record of the estimation in which Shakespeare was held by intelligent and cultivated people when he was thirty four years old. In this book Shakespeare is awarded for the highest place in English poetical and dramatic literature. It is true that other poets and dramatists are compared by Meres to Pindar. . .”

“In that year, too, the greatness and universality of his genius received formal recognition in the hands of literary criticism. Francis Meres published in 1598 a book called Palladis Tamia, Wits treasury, which was a collection of sententious comparisons, chiefly upon morals, manners, and religion.”“Hiscomparative

At the beginning of June 1594, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were playing at Newington with the Admiral’s Men. In their repertoire were: ‘Andronicus’, ‘The Tamynge of a Shrowe’ and ‘Hamlet’, but whose Hamlet was this ? Was it Kyd’s ?

The biographer has said that William received formal recognition at the hands of literary criticism and he says that the listing of his name among dozens of English poets “can hardly be regarded as criticism” but because Meres “was a Master of Arts in both universities, a theological writer and the author of poetry which has been lost”, he is given as an example that William was held in the highest place in the estimation of “intelligent and cultivated people” when he was only 34 years old. William had been known to have his name in two books of poetry only at this time of 1598 and Meres had copied down his name along with “Maister Edward Ferris, the Authour of the Mirrour for Magistrates, and Maister Rowley, once a rare scholler of learned Pembroke Hall in Cambridge” and this is introduced as evidence of “the greatest and universality of his genius” in 1598. These two books, Venus and Lucrece, are the reason for listing William in four different categories that ‘makes no pretence to analysis or aesthetic judgement’

The last name of 13 English poets that Meres lists as being the best for ‘tragedie’ is ‘Beniamin Iohnson’ who in 1598 was known for having written his first play ‘Everyman in his Humour’, his most successful comedy. This ‘comparative discourse of our English Poets’ is but a small portion in the 660 page book of Meres, and is not the purpose of the whole book. It is possible that he founded his information on supposition or general misunderstanding. There was no more reason to attribute one of the Plays to ‘William’ than another. Meres misspells ‘Jonson’.

On August 23, 1600, Andrew Wise and William Aspley registered “two bookes, the one called ‘Muche a Doo about nothinge’, Thother the Second parte of the history of Kinge Henry the iiijth with the humours of Sire John Falstaff: Written by master Shakespeare”. These quartos were for sale in St Paul’s Churchyard under ‘As it hath been sundrie times publickly acted by the right honourable, the Lord Chamberlaine his servants. Written by William Shakespeare’ In August of 1603, a stationer in Exeter, Christopher Hunt, listed the books in stock. Of the ‘Interludes & tragedyes’ were “Marchant of Vennis, taming of a shrew, loves labor lost, loves labor won”. This indicated that ‘Loves labor won’ was not ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ as some biographers claim. Hunt had published five cantos of Richard Carew’s ‘Godfrey of Bulloigne’ which ‘it was his good hap to get into his hands’. Carew was an admirer of William’s poems, but he did not know of the plays, and he coupled William to Marlowe and compared him with Catullus in a letter to William Camden. How was Francis Meres to say who wrote which play when there were no quartos printed with William’s name on them, except for ‘Loues Labore Lost’ that does not say that it was written by but only “augmented by ‘W. Shakespere’” ? There is little that is reprinted from the remainder of those 660 pages of Tamia but one line may give some idea of Meres’ style of reporting.“Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death by a bawdy servingman, a rival of his in his lewd love.” This is not true. A man named ‘Christopher Morley’ was stabbed by ‘Ingram Frizer’ who was not a servingman nor was he a rival of this man for love or for money. Meres does not give any source to the version that he gives. Meres knew nothing personally of Morley or of Marlowe and he did not know personally of anything about ‘William’ taking for granted only what he may have heard someone else say which is hearsay. Thomas Beard said about Marlowe in his ‘Theatre of God’s Judgment’, “The manner of his death was terrible, for he even cursed and blasphemed to his last gasp, and together with his breath an oath flew out of his mouth”. None of this was even possible according to the description of the stabbing by the only witnesses, the three other men who occupied the upper room of an inn. Morley died instantly as the dagger penetrated his skull. the wound “of the depth of two inches and the width of one inch” just above the right eye. The description of the struggle between Morley and Frizer contends that Morley was stretched out on a bed in an upper room, and after “clever malicious words”, supposedly caused by a disagreement over the inn keeper’s bill for the food at noon, Morley lunged for a dagger on Frizer’s belt, took it and gave Frizer several superficial or trifling wounds. In the ensuing struggle, Frizer, who had been seated with his back to Morley, wrestled for the dagger and ‘unintentionally’ dealt the fatal blow of which “the aforesaid Christopher Morley instantly died”.

If the blow was unintentional, it is odd that the dagger would pierce the skull bone to the depth of two inches. Biographer Peter Quennell feels that there is little support for the theory that Morley was “disposed of as a secret agent”.

‘The Tamynge of a Shrew’ was published as ‘A pleasant and Conceited Historie, called The Tamynge of A Shrew: As it was sundry times acted by the Right honourable the Earl of Pembroke his servants’. This is a different play to ‘The Taming of THE Shrew’ in the first Folio. The ‘Hamlet’ of 1594 was considered to be the lost ‘Hamlet’ of Kyd. In 1594, ‘Andronicus’ was ‘The Most Lamentable Tragedie of Titus Andronicus: As it was Plaide by the Right Honourable the Earl of Darbie, Earle of Pembroke, and the Earle of Sussex their servants’. In the printing of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, some editions, instead of the character names ‘Dogberry and Verges’, ‘two foolish Officers’, had the names of the actors, ‘Kempe’ and ‘Crowley’, printed.

However, two of the men in the room were supposed to be at that time in Europe on the business of ‘spying’ as a secret agent. Robert Poley, one of the men, was employed by Francis Walsingham as a spy and as ‘secret agent’. At that time, travel to the continent was comparatively rare and the meaning of a ‘spy’ was in reality only a person who would travel to another country to report on what was happening in that country which was the only manner in which ‘news’ of another country was possible. No one being privy to private or governmental affairs, the only information gained by ‘spies’ was unofficial word of mouth opinions that were prevalent by patrons of the inns.

The three men in the upper room were at this inn house for a reason known only to them and Thomas Beard and Francis Meres were either making up their statements or were repeating what some other person had invented without any idea of what actually transpired in the room nor did they know who Christopher Morley was or why he spent more than six hours having dinner at noon with these two men, Robert Poley and Ingram Frizer, and then all three walking up and down the outer garden from one o’clock until “the sixth hour after noon” all of which, witnesses say, was a casual friendly meeting. The three men then went to an upper room after walking in the garden and together they had spent eight hours at the inn. Francis Meres placed in his ‘Palladis Tamia’ a wholly fabricated statement about Christopher Marlowe, a full five years after this event. It was complete hearsay not substantiated by one witness or by those who conducted the inquest or by those who wrote the official report and death certificate. Meres then also placed hearsay about William in his book with no knowledge of who William was as he had never met him. No one ever claimed to have known or to have seen a William Shake speare. The man killed in the upper room of the inn was referred to in print and in official papers directly after as ‘Marley’, not as Marlowe.

About one mile west of Greenwich, is a grave in the churchyard of St. Nicholas at Deptford where was buried on the first day of June, 1593, someone now referred to as Christopher Marlowe. Was anyone buried there ? All of the biographers are silent as to there being a marker or if there is a gravestone, the exact wording on it is not described. It has been recorded in the biography of Christopher Marlowe by John H. Ingram (1970) that “The earliest writers to refer to Marlowe’s death, although none of them appears to have had trustworthy accounts of it, speak of him as having received ‘all the help surgery could afford’ and, therefore, as not having died from his wound at once.” “An inquest and a coroner’s verdict must have followed the death, but no record of the case can now be traced.” (!)

THE MISINTERPRETATIONS CONTINUE Robert J. Meyer

The Times Literary Supplement, London, reviews dozens of new books on the subject of ‘William Shakespeare’ written and published in the 21st century. Many if not all of these reviews reiterate claims that are long known to be misunderstandings or outright falsities already explained or clarified within.

The biographies thereafter were upon the life of Stratford William that was completely void of any mention of the theatre, plays or even a letter written by Stratford William. No book or other literature written or printed is known to be in his possession while books, papers and records of his physician son in law, with whom William lived, were extensive and bequeathed to his own son in law. The physician had many named and illustrious patients from London non of whom ever mentioned of being in the house of ‘S’, yet there is no indication that anyone from London ever visited William at Stratford before his death in 1616 nor did anyone visit any of William’s relatives at Stratford after 1623 when the Folio of Plays was first printed that included the phrase, ‘thy Stratford moniment’, in the dedication poem and that alone began the belief that the Great Author was ‘William Shaxper’ of Stratford.

The book review continues: “For Shakespeare, by contrast’, we have a large number of Quarto editions, produced by many different publishers, on the title pages of which his name occurs more often than that of any other dramatist of the period, together with two narrative poems personally dedicated to his patron, Southampton….”

The number and exact wording of the title pages is known and is included in one of these essays and the spelling varies, its position varies and the name is credited as author or ‘by’ and as ‘corrected by’. These are Quartos, not the original manuscripts.

In the TLS issue of August 19 & 26, 2005, the reviewer, Brian Vickers, comments on Peter Dawkins’ statement in his ‘The Shakespeare Enigma’, “The facts we have about Shakespeare’s literary life compared with those to do with other major writers, are outstandingly few. Indeed, one could say that they are virtually nil”. Vickers counters this by saying, “What we know of that great writer Thomas Kyd can be written on the back of an envelope. For Richard Hathway, described by Francis Meres as among the ‘best for comedy’, Henslowe’s Diary records the titles of eighteen plays he co authored for the Admiral’s and Worcester’s Men between 1598 and 1603: none has Hathway’ssurvived.”playsdid not ‘survive’ to the present as those of others may not have continued in popularity but Dawkins compared ‘Shakespeare’ to ‘other major writers’ whose work has survived. Little is known of the person of Thomas Kyd, a major writer, but no one has spent the amount of time searching for information on Kyd that writers have in grasping upon any shred of reference or indication on ‘William Shake speare’ and no one seriously sought any information on that name until the nineteenth century. Until that time the first ‘biography’ and all subsequent ‘Lifes’ were satisfied with innuendo that was not verified, ‘jeests’ and invented stories of William as a boy that came to light only after 1665 when Sir William Davenant reopened the theatre productions with some of the Plays. Even a member of the London Shakespeare Society in the 19th century invented the life of ‘William’ at home in Stratford reading to his family from a classic book, a tome that the poor family could never have afforded. When another Society member went to Stratford and found the town records, the former member thought it a waste of time. Birth, death and marriage records of the family were almost all of the information found and so subsequent biographies were enlarged by including information on other citizens of Stratford and any letters that referred to ‘William’. There were never any letters written by William. Documents gave only the scrawled signatures on his will and on the mortgage.

Previous references to this mention not a named ‘notebook’ but an unpublished paper found in Ben Jonson’s possessions. William was not a ‘fellow actor’ and the two actors were not ‘editors’ of the plays nor did they bring them to the printer of the First Folio.

On the First Folio of 1623, the name ‘William Shakespeare’ is printed and the man of Stratford does not have any hand in this as he died in 1616. One of those who bring the Plays to the printer is the man who also brought at least one play of Christopher Marlowe to a printer.

“In his notebook ‘Discoveries’ Jonson took issue with Shakespeare’s fellow actors (such as Heminge and Condell who edited the First Folio)…”

None of the persons named above “knew him well” as the TLS reviewer, Brian Vickers, implies. They ‘knew of him’ as his name is on the Quartos, but there is no evidence that these men or any other person had met, glimpsed or had spoken to the ‘Author of the Plays’.

Several poets ‘personally’ dedicated their published sonnets and verse to the same Southampton but the Earl never offered his patronage to anyone.

All of the play material had been saved from early 1590’s to 1623, some 33 years, collected and ‘edited’. They are also ‘selected’ as only those few Quarto versions were credited to ‘Wllm Shakespeare’ or ‘Shakespear’ and the First Folio contains over 30 plays. There exists no evidence that anyone at the time objected to the inclusion of the additional Plays being or not being authored by this ‘William Shakespeare’. Before the end of the century, a total of over 70 plays were subsequently printed under the name.

Greene did not refer to Shakespeare by name but to ‘a player’ on the stage who earns more money acting the plays that the authors do writing them. Only those biographers of the twentieth century who claim that William was an actor interpret Greene’s words to ‘prove’ that William of Stratford was an actor to indicate that William was out of his home town of Stratford and residing and employed in a theatre in London at this early date. The particular theatre is never named. This led to claims of his having an invested interest in the Burbadge’s theatre company and then to being a director in the theatre and finally to so much an ‘owner’ that all further references are to ‘Shakespeare’s Company’ all stemming from the printed name on those few printed Quartos. There is no evidence that the three Burbadges recognized Shakespeare as a company member or as a shareholder. None even referred to him as a person whom they knew.

“We have a huge number of allusions, both laudatory and envious from fellow writers and other in the London theatre-world who knew him well (Greene, Meres, Jonson, Heywood, Webster, Marston, Gabriel Harvey, Chettle, Weever, Dekker) an almost continuous series of references from 1592 to his death in 1616 All of which identify him as both an actor and author. Many legal documents have survived.”

The Dedication over the names ‘Heminge and Condell’ appeared in the Folio of 1632 long after both actors were deceased and so they had no hand in the printing and they had no say in the words that are credited to them therein. As many of his contemporaries knew, he always signed himself as ‘Heminges’. The mistaken spelling continues in many biographies because of the printed Dedication and also because of that printing, many references are to those two only including the forged inserts of monies left to them in Willy’s will penned between the original lines.The Dedication does not state that John Heminges and Henry Condell ‘edited’ the first Folio or the Second Folio wherein the Dedication is printed. It states, “We have but collected them”.

“…. Together with two narrative poems personally dedicated to his patron Southampton.”

In the other preface over their names, ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’, it states, “his friends…to have collected and published them” but which manuscripts did they ‘collect’ ? The vituperative condemnation of all previously printed copies, Quartos, is quite clear in the words, “as where (before) you were abused with divers stolen, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors, that exposed them;…” The ‘(before)’ seems to be a later editorial inclusion to make the meaning clear but also to support the belief that these two actors wrote these prefaces. Some may ask, ‘Why would these two actors over all the other actors of the company take upon themselves the task of having ‘collected them and published them; and so to have published them” ?

The stocks were on the corner in front of the building where farm animals were sold or traded. These animals later were given the name of ‘live stock’ and the building became named as the ‘stock market’. A money lender also stood at the corner to lend monies and to receive interest or payment in full, William from Stratford and he lived at one time on a street north off the main street running north east from the corner in east London a one time.

The ‘Variety’ preface seems to answer this: “It had been a thing, we confess, worthy to have been wished that the Author himself had lived to have set forth and overseen his own writings; but since it hath been ordained otherwise, and he by death departed from that right…”. However, most if not all the members of the company were deceased and it would appear that Heminges and Condell were still living in n 1632 to bring, not those “maimed and deformed” Quartos but, rather, those “perfect of the limbs…absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them”. ‘William Shakespeare’, then, did not take to the printers the Quartos published with his name upon them or those Quartos without any name upon them and he did not ‘collect’ those plays that are printed now from those in the Folios. England’s ‘Greatest Dramatist’ did not publish ‘his’ plays.

The book, “Shakespeare Revealed” by Rene Weis is reviewed in the TLS, October 12, 2007 by Lois Potter. The expectation to learn new realities of the man is quickly expunged as once again, as usual, the book is about ‘William of Stratford’ still confused with the ‘Author of the Plays’. As reported by the reviewer, the author: “…is perhaps most useful when asking questions that still need answers, such as why the citizens of Stratford grew so many elms on their property, even though they had to pay tax on them; why, at the time of Shakespeare’s marriage “the church authorities in Worcester accepted a bond for a bride who had who different names and two different addresses” or why neither Shakespeare nor any of his siblings took part in the civic government of the town where their father had been a leading official for so long.”

These questions are merely more data on London of 1600, with no relevance to the Author of the Plays. To tie Stratford further to the Theatre outside the London wall, the intimation that the author, Weis, visualizes William of Stratford attending his brother Edmund’s “funeral in St Saviour’s Church, Southwark” suggests that William “might have noticed the nearby tomb of John Gower and decided to write a play, Pericles, based on a story in Gower’s ‘Confessio Amantis’.”

The simple answer to the last question is that the father, ‘an official for so long’, ended as having no money and William’s brother became a haberdasher in London and William finally went to London to continue to be a money lender taking his place daily in front of the ‘stocks market’ in East London where stood the stocks, ‘the timber frame with holes confining the ankles and arms used to publicly display offenders’.

Simon Forman’s 1598 diary, elaborates on the activity of Christopher Mountjoy’s adulterous wife, Marie, whose social circle includes “the adulterous mercer, the pregnant maid, the sonneteer’s mistress, the runaway apprentice” and Forman calls himself “the charismatic magicotherapist”.Areviewof the book, ‘“Hamlet” without Hamlet’, by Margreta de Grazia, appears in the TLS August 15, 2008, by Bart Van Es. “It opens by making what the author herself calls the “sweeping claim” that “a 200 year old critical tradition” on Hamlet “has been built on an oversight (and of the Play’s premise no less).” That “premise”, we are told, is its hero’s “dispossession”: only by ignoring the Prince’s failure to inherit his father’s kingdom has it been possible to construct Prince Hamlet as a modernThisman.”raises the same question as in the essay here on Hamlet. Hamlet’s father, who is also called Hamlet, is killed and his brother Claudius takes the throne but Hamlet also looses the inheritance of wealth that is not mentioned in the Play. This is another oversight among the many described in the essay. Nowhere in the Play and particularly nowhere in any of the several soliloquies does Hamlet Jr. decry this loss of wealth usurped by his uncle.

is the wife of the tyre maker in Sylver Str between Muggle Str and Lytil Wood Str, London, in whose upper room, the man, William of Stratford, lived for a time. It is definitely known that he is William Shaxper of Stratford as he was summoned from ‘retirement at Stratford’ by a legal document to be a witness in the Mountjoy 1612 trial in London relating to Stephan Belott’s attempt to gain a marriage settlement from his father in law, Christopher Mountjoy. William was a poor witness as he could not remember the exact sum of the promised dowry of which he had been informed and he stumbled on other questions.

“Stretch the imagination further and it is discovered that “Emilia Lanier, Jane Davenant and Marie Mountjoy three women who knew Shakespeare well were all patients of Dr Simon Forman, and that the man whom Shakespeare made his executor, Thomas Russell, was both a friend of the Willoughby whose son published Willoughby His Avisa (1594) with its apparently coded references to Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton, and was also, by his second marriage, stepfather of Leonard Digges whose verses on Shakespeare were published in the 1623 Folio.”All of the above names concern people from Stratford and district. Jane Davenant is the wife of the man who owned an Inn at Oxon on the way from London to Stratford and the mother of William Davenant who, the story goes, William of Stratford dandled upon his knee when Shaxper stopped over from his rented room in London to his house in Stratford. After 1665, the play producer, Davenant, claimed to his alehouse friends that he was the godson of the Author and occasionally slyly hinted that he was William of Stratford’s actual son. Davenant, whether he believed Stratford William was the Author or not, made money in drawing the believers into his theatre and then proceeded to search art shops of London to choose a ‘portrait’ of his ‘father’ and he found it the portrait known as ‘The Chandos’. The three women knew William Shaxper of Stratford.MarieMountjoy

Dr Simon Forman is also a note keeper and his comments upon his patients and those he knew in the district are in print. He was also a play goer and he leaves an account of the performance of one of the Plays when the theatre caught fire. Two of the Burbadge players lived in the area. Although he knew well the Mountjoys, Foreman leaves no comment or information that he knew that Shaxper lived in their house shoppe or that he personally knew the Author of the Plays or knew the identity of the Author.

A review by Adrian Poole in the TLS, July 29, 2005 reminds that “the ancient Greeks and Romans swore every day ‘By Hercules’, as Shakespeare makes one of Antony’s soldiers do just before the Battle of Actium. A few scenes later Antony’s soldiers imagine the music they hear is the god Hercules withdrawing his blessing from their leader. Earlier on, Cleopatra has teasingly called him ‘this Herculean Roman’.”

“Other Shakespearian characters invoke this icon of strength, as Hamlet does when …he thinks of Claudius as ‘no more like my father than I to Hercules’. References to classical myth and story rank high: allusions to Daphe and Apollo, to ‘Niobe all tears’ ‘Tarquin’s ravishing stride’, ‘Ariachne’s broken woof’. At school, he probably read Cato, Aesop, Cicero, Ovid, Virgil, Terence. We can tell from the evidence of his works that Ovid, Seneca and Plutarch were essential to him, that he made good use of Plautus and the Greek prose romances.”

The Latin authors were the greater part of the curriculum at ‘Free School’ in the England of Elizabeth but one former pupil of that era stated that what had learned in the winter was forgotten after the summer and their Latin lessons were of no use to them later in their work of printing, haberdashery, farming or as a wool merchant. Only those who went to a University, either at Canterbury or at Oxford, had further use of their Free School Latin in their profession as a physician, clergyman, naval officer or foreign serviceman. Familiarity with the Latin authors also made it possible for a man to become a playwright or poet particularly after 1585 when more poets and playwrights were active in London than ever before or since.

This is a personal loss, as well as the loss of the kingdom which merely is assumed in the Play and, as referred to in this review, Hamlet “does not bemoan the loss of a kingdom in these soliloquies”.Inthesame edition of TLS, another review, this of “Shakespeare in Parts” authored by Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, is written by Lois Potter who opens by writing: “According to Samuel Johnson, the actress Hannah Pritchard always went home after the sleepwalking scene in Macbeth and had no idea how the play ended.” The authors “base their book on the assumption that most of Shakespeare’s company were like she is. The Elizabethan actor worked from a script consisting only of his own lines plus cues of merely one or two words. He learned his part on his own, though he may get help from the author or a senior member of the company’ there was no director.”

The authors give examples of the mix ups that could result from not knowing when another actor would utter the two-word cue or who would give it. All of this is obvious and these uncertainties undermine the premise of the book. No source is given in the review to substantiate any of this process nor is there any authority given that “there was no director”. As usual, the reviewer inserts “Shakespeare’s company” ignoring that it is owned by the Burbadges, the father and his two Severalsons.authors in the 20th and the 21st centuries still emphasize how well read the author of the ‘Shakespeare Plays’ must have been, as were Spenser, Chapman and Christopher Marlowe, by citing excerpts from the Plays. Marlowe was ‘gone’ by the time the name ‘Shakespeare’ was first recorded at the Registry Office, where no other person than the Registrar read it and so Marlowe could not have ‘cited excerpts from the Plays’ by a name that he never knew. Neither did George Chapman and Edmund Spenser need to cite excerpts by still living in 1599. It is vastly more likely that the ‘Plays’ are reworded plays of several original authors. Many of the titles are known to have originated by other early playwrights.

All of the plays written in that late Elizabethan time were written by those who had a university or similar higher training. The Plays credited to ‘Shakespeare’ in the First Folio were so written. This alone eliminates William Shaxper of Stratford as a playwright as it known that he did not attend a university and it is not known if he completed the necessary number of years at Free School at Stratford. Another statistic that casts doubt on ‘Shakespeare’ being one writer is the number of plays finally decided to be in the current collection or in the original Folio. No one person had before has written anywhere near the number of 30 odd plays. No one throughout the 1600’s or the 1700’s, no one in the 19th century until George Bernard Shaw in the late 19th and early 20th century. Shaw’s plays did not need the amount of research of historical tomes or legends written in French or Italian, although, possibly, Shaw spent a longer time preparing and penning his ‘introductions to’ each play than in writing them.

The un credited biographer in ‘The Complete Shakespeare’ Books, Inc. (1939) under ‘Life of W.S.’ says of this: “Now, had Ben Jonson been at that date, the author of the comedy called ‘Umers’ and had it been his ‘Every Man in his Humor’ which was acted by the Lord Admiral’s players eleven times, it is not very likely that Henslowe would have been ignorant of who Benjamin Jonson was, and have spoken of him, not as one of the dramatists in his day, and as the author of a very successful comedy, but merely a ‘bricklayer’.”

Assessing the character of Ben Jonson must be taken in chronological order, the only manner to judge the evidence of the motivation of those involved with the Theatre at the turn of the 17th century. In not following this procedure, the biographers most often mislead their readers as they constantly have in mind events that followed 20 or 30 years later as they do when describing their imagined ‘relationship’ between Ben Jonson and ‘William’ They have forefront in their minds the kind and ‘loving’ comments that Jonson wrote in his verse printed in the Folio. Generally, they do not tell when, where or why those comments were made, but when they do, it is too late not to have given the wrong impression. Another frequent approach that they make is to compare Jonson to their picture of William in every aspect, his ‘character’, his appearance and their opinions of the ‘man’. This cannot be done fairly as nothing is known of ‘William’ and if they believed him to be from Stratford, few were ever interested in the dull information gathered about the true William of Stratford documented in the town records, but they prefer their own surmises of his character taken from certain speeches in the Plays.

THE MYSTERY OF BEN JONSON Robert J. Meyer

Ben Jonson was the posthumous son of “a grave minister of the Gospel”. His widowed mother married a master bricklayer and when Ben had finished school at Westminster, he had to join his stepfather in the brick laying business. At Westminster, he had well learned the methods of research and study from his schoolmaster, William Camden, the antiquarian. When he was about 19, he volunteered into the wars in the Netherlands, returned in 1592 and joined Philip Henslowe’s company as apprentice playwright and actor. The label of ‘bricklayer’ seems to have stuck with him. In 1598, after writing and seeing his first play produced at Henslowe’s Rose Theatre and again at the Curtain, he fought fellow actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel and killed him. Henslowe wrote to Ned Alleyn, his former lead actor, in a letter dated September 26, 1598, saying,: “Since you were with me, I have lost one of my company , which hurteth me greatly; that is Gabriel, for he is slain in Hexton Fields by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer.”

This seems to be a logical deduction except that this biographer should have known and not ’have been ignorant of’ Jonson having joined Henslowe in 1592 or of Jonson having left his stepfather’s employ when he was eighteen. The same un named biographer in commenting upon the Cambridge plays, ‘The Parnassus Trilogy’ says:

A.L .Rowse in his ‘Shakespeare, 1963’, P284, says: “Jonson stands in as marked contrast to Shakespeare, eight years his senior, as Marlowe had done earlier”. It is really William who stands in marked contrast to both Jonson and Marlowe. Jonson, although critical of Marlowe’s approach to drama, was in his personal life similar to the other poets and playwrights, Nashe, Greene, Kyd and Marlowe in that he spoke out against abuses of the time and he felt that they should be spoken about in plays; Jonson had a similar classical approach, although he didn’t attend Oxford or Cambridge; he didn’t avoid confrontation when he felt that it was necessary, and he had been arrested for killing a man in swordplay and again for placing into his plays material that was topical to local events as did most of the other dramatists with the possible exception of Marlowe who chose topics that dealt with the international scene, writing Tamburlaine’ and ‘Massacre at Paris’ at the time of tensions with Spain and France.

“Not the most distant allusion is made to any of his [William’s] dramatic productions, although the poet criticized by the young students immediately before Shakespeare was Ben Jonson, who was declared to be ‘the wittiest fellow of a bricklayer, in England, but a slow inventor’. Hence, we might be led to imagine that, even down to as late a period as the commencement of the 17th century, the reputation of Shakespeare depended upon his poems than upon his plays; almost as if productions for the stage were not looked upon, at that date, as part of the recognized literature of the country.”

The added comment by a character on stage that Ben was ‘a slow inventor’ is ironic as, again, the author probably knew that Ben was prolific as he was quickly answering each play by Marston or Dekker with a timely but minutely detailed play in retort: ‘The Case is Altered’, ‘Cynthia’s Revels’, ‘Poetaster’, ‘Epicaene or the Silent Woman’. In the sequel play, ‘Return from Parnassus’, performed at St. John’s, an actor taking on the character of William Kempe, a former Burbadge player at that time, acts out these lines: “Why, here’s our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down, aye, and Ben Jonson, too. O, that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow. He brought up Horace, giving the poets a pill; but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his credit.”

This biographer wonders why no dramatic production is mentioned, and since there is no mention, the reason must be that “productions for the stage were not looked upon as recognized literature”. It is difficult to believe that a biographer, printed in 1939, did not know that there were no printed plays under that name at that time. Only ‘Venus’ and Lucrece’ were printed with that name and they are the subject of this section of the Cambridge farce. This biographer correctly places commas around the phrase, “of a bricklayer” where other biographers often do not place commas there. With the commas in place, the sentence reads quite differently. This requires the sentence to be read as, Jonson “is the wittiest fellow, [who is the son] of a bricklayer, in England”. Again this biographer says nothing of Ben’s stepfather being a bricklayer, and he may be ignorant of this but the wags at Cambridge knew this and placed that information between commas.

/ No one seems to know what is meant by the ‘purge’ that William is to have given Jonson. To wonder about it is to be convinced that the unknown author is neither joking nor mistaken. This is a large assumption about what is a trilogy of undergraduate farce for the enjoyment of students who are aware of their current London. There is no evidence that William wrote anything for the choirboy actors at the Blackfriars who performed the plays of Marston and Jonson.The most logical explanation that has been forwarded is that for some reason the author believed that William wrote one of the rebuttal plays to Jonson’s plays, but he did not. When quoting these lines from ‘Return from Parnassus’ biographers usually do not identify that these words are spoken in fictitious lines by a character representing a real person, Will Kempe. This actor had just returned from a trip on the continent. He, the real Kempe, was a wit saying of his leaving the acting company that he had “just walked away from the world”. He left the ‘Globe’. A.L. Rowse says (1963, P285), “Jonson’s first play for Shakespeare’s company made a sharp impact”, and later, “For Shakespeare’s company he [Jonson] wrote ‘Every Man out of his Humour’.” There never was a ‘Shakespeare’s company’, but the phrase is repeated constantly with no reference to the Burbadges. In Rowse’s next sentence: “Shakespeare’s willingness to take the risk though he did not act in it was so much evidence of Jonson’s growing reputation with the town, particularly with the students of the Inns of Court, to whom it is dedicated.”

Even though this collection of duties for William would be impossible for any playwright, the claim is an insult to any playwright as it completely ignores the amount of time that would be necessary to write anywhere near 36 plays based upon research of several great tomes of history to know the characters and to invent their dialogue. These ‘duties’ do not add up to more ‘functions’ than those of Burbadge, leaving aside playwright. Richard was an actor, co owner of more than half of the shares as well as being director of stage productions and co manager of the entire operation with his brother, Cuthbert, who managed the financial end of the business that they inherited from their father, James. The brothers owned the Theatre in Shoreditch and managed the Curtain theatre as well. They possibly never heard the phrase ‘patented member’.

Rowse, in his ‘Shakespeare and the Blackfriars Theatre’ even quotes G.E. Bentley. From his ‘Shakespeare Survey’, Bentley says: “He is the only dramatist we know who owned stock in the theatre buildings over an extended period. His income was derived from acting, from writing plays, from shares in dramatic enterprises, and from theatre rents. He had more connections with the Company than any other man: he was actor, shareholder, patented member, principal playwright, and one of the housekeepers of the Globe; even Burbage did not serve so many functions in the Company.”

However, Bentley has more to say, that William is “the only one who did not shift about from company to company, but maintained his close association with a single acting group for more than twenty years” The only ‘evidence’ of his association with the company still relies upon that one statement forged two centuries later. Now Bentley has more on the ‘Will’ of Stratford“HeWilliam:singlesout

only three for a last remembrance. These men are John Heminges, Henry Condell and Richard Burbage all three actors, all three fellow sharers in the acting Company of the King’s Men, all three fellow stockholders in the Globe and Blackfriars”. All three ways of saying the same thing, but he believes that Burbadge is a ‘fellow sharer’ in the company that he owns. Bentley never mentions two other members who were still living at the time of the Mr Shaxper’s Will, Nicholas Tooley and Cuthbert Burbadge who is also a co owner and these two are also not mentioned by William of Stratford in his Will, as the later century forger did not know that they were still living or did not know their names when penning the three most well known names of the others, at the time of the forgery, but only between the lines on the Will.

William was in no position to ‘take the risk’ as he was not the producer, the director, an actor, or part owner of the company. All of these occupations are inventions of the biographers or based upon ‘found’ documents that were later proved as forgeries of the 19th century.

Still, yet, again appears a long list of items of William’s accomplishments but many are the same things said several ways to set him apart from all others, this time outdoing even Burbadge. He was ‘the principal playwright’, but he was ‘one’ of the housekeepers. Bentley has read that all sharers in the company had to take turns at cleaning up the theatre, so William automatically was a housekeeper since he was a sharer for which there is only one sheet of paper that said he was a member when the company played in the Blackfriars theatre in the late 1590’s but found in a later century and then found to be a forgery which was obvious as no adult actors played in the Blackfriars in the 1590’s, a morsel of information that the forger did not know. All biographers should know this but they continue to attribute to him these various chores in the theatre building upon this one untrue statement of his owning shares which they extend to his owning the entire company. There exists no ‘biography’ of the author of ‘Hamlet’. All biographies are based upon the town records of a citizen of Stratford called ‘William Shaxper’ and only those ‘records’ that state birth, marriage, children and brothers and other relatives plus a letter or two from friends.

4 Ben Jonson at the age of 19 joined Phillip Henslowe’s company in 1592 as actor and apprentice playwright revising plays already in the company. He was educated at Westminster but not having attended a university, ‘W.S.’ biographers hastily conclude that he was not one of the ‘university wits’ although he was very ‘classical’ in his approach to drama as he advocated the principles of drama as established by Aristotle. He praised these while adversely criticizing the mixing of comedy with tragedy or any of the improvisational qualities as introduced by Marlowe and others who were dubbed ‘university wits’ by some ‘W.S.’ biographers. Mention of Jonson joining Henslowe in mid 1592 after a brief service in the English army in Flanders is usually missing in accounts of William. The year 1592 is the critical time in the establishment of ‘early William’ and with no evidence of him this early, the biographers then claim that William was sent into two years of ‘leisure time’ as these are the beginning months of the plague.

“It is completely in keeping with what we should expect, and bears out our portrait of him”. This is true. This famous speech from the mouth of Hamlet does fit perfectly with this perfect picture that biographers have dreamed about the man as it fits their own invented description: “his insinuating grace”, “that nature both sensitive and musical”, “prudent and detached”. In quoting Hamlet’s speech, A. L. Rowse interweaves his comments with: “How like him this is in every line, how it coheres with everything we know about him, as to the manner, he was a perfectionist: ‘Now this overdone or come tardy off’, later, ‘That’s villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it’.”

If the listing of ‘Umers’ in Henslowe’s diary in 1597 is actually Ben’s ‘Every Man in his Humour’, the printed statement in the collection of Jonson plays says that this play was first performed in 1598 Jonson was critical of several of the ‘W.S.’ Plays. He pointed out statements in ‘Julius Caesar’ that were ‘silly’. He dismissed ‘Pericles’ as “a mouldy tale”. He was “loathe to make nature afraid like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries” ! He was a painstaking writer who demanded exact scholarship and had a respect for the rules by Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ and Horace’s ‘Art of Poetry’. He was a realist and thought Marlowe wrong in pursuing romanticism. He was convinced that tragedy should be ordered and united, not constructed loosely and comedy, he felt, should portray the inane behaviour of humanity so that people would change their opinions by attending plays. He described the follies of the world and believed that plays should be written in a way that would promote reform. He had no patience with tales of ‘fairies’ or sentimental romances or the mix up stories of misidentification with girls dressed as boys. For what ‘W.S.’ considered good play writing, the biographers have no pronouncements that were left by their ‘Master Poet’ and so they depend upon Hamlet’s speech to the players. These biographers stress their belief that Hamlet’s admonition to the ‘Players’ is really William speaking what he considered as fine acting and they present this as if it were true.

Biographers credit William with all the duties that are documented as being performed by Jonson at the same time, revising works already in the repertoire, acting in minor roles and generally doing anything that had to be done while being apprentice playwright. Yet William is never described as being an apprentice. Jonson did not write his own first play until six years later, 1598, at which time, as the apocryphal story goes, Jonson’s play was rejected by someone who had to be someone in authority at the Burbadge theatre in Shoreditch. By chance, as the fable goes, William happened by, saw at a glace on a page some ‘merit’ in the play and recommended that Burbadge produce the play; thus, William is credited with ‘discovering’ the talent of an ‘unknown’ Ben Jonson who happened to be on stage and working for a rival theatre company, Henslowe’s, for the past six years, William thus making him an ‘overnight’ success. No one explains why Jonson, after serving with Henslowe, would take his first play to the Curtain Theatre over in Shoreditch.

How like ‘who’ is this last original line ? Hamlet has demanded that the Players not strut and bellow which some biographers interpret as a sideways swipe at Ben Jonson who they suspect is an actor who would ‘tear a passion to tatters’, without any foundation for saying this, yet Rowse“Wasasks:this, perhaps, the well known ‘purge’ that Shakespeare administered to the critical Ben ? Critics never much relish being given a piece of their own back, especially by someone who knows how to do the job far better than they do. And this passage is in keeping with what is known as Jonson’s own acting, bellowing and strutting in parts like Jeronimo and Zulziman’.”

Orig: There are them, I can tell you, that will laugh themselves to set on …

Folio: …some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too.

Orig: …some quantity of barren spectators to laugh with them.

The quotation of Hamlet’s speech used here is the way it appears in the books today, but the original speech ran much longer as did the whole play. There was a ‘Hamlet’ written before this one by Thomas Kyd, still making the rounds at least as late as 1596. Was there this admonition to the Players in that earlier play ? If this play does have in it a similar scene with Hamlet coaching the Players, and the scene today is a rewording, then out goes the biographers edict, “how like the man this is in every line !” How it coheres to Thomas Kyd ! The answer that Hamlet gives to the First Player has been rewritten from the original into the Folio version.

There is no evidence that William directed or produced plays. It was Heywood who wrote ‘An apology for Actors’ brimming with observations and judgements on the art of the actor.

Folio: And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them: Orig: Let not your clowns speak more than is set down.

Folio: For there be of them that will themselves laugh to set on …

Folio: Although in the meantime, some necessary question of the play be then to be considered: Orig: Albeit there is some necessary point in the play to be observed.

Orig: O ‘tis vile, and shows a pitiful ambition in the fool that useth it. And then, you have some again that keep one suit of jests as a man is known by one suit of apparel, and gentlemen quote his jests down in their tables before they come to the play, as thus ‘Cannot you stay till I eat my porridge?’ and ‘You owe me a quarter’s wages’; and ‘My coat wants a sullisen’ and ‘Your beer is sour’; and blabbering with his lips and thus keeping in his cinque pace of jests, when, God knows, the warm clown cannot make a jest unless by chance, as the blind man catcheth the hare.

Rather than realizing that the character in the play, Hamlet, must be consistent with the person that the Author has intended, the biographers reason that this whole passage complies with the picture of the Author as they imagine him, therefore he wrote the play and only he could have written the play as only a man like the picture they imagine of him could have written this passage. ‘How could it be otherwise ?’

“There is plain speaking and yet there are people who suppose that we know nothing of Shakespeare, what he was like, or what he thought. In these passages he gives us the upshot of his reflections, the benefit of his experience, as an actor over many years, now at the height of his powers. Nor can it be doubted that there enter into his criticism the fruits of his observation judgement as a producer.” If this speech to the Players ‘coheres to everything that is known about’ Shake spare, it then signifies nothing as there is nothing that is ‘known’ other than a fully detailed resume of a money lender in the Stratford town office who biographers of the 19th and 20th centuries cling to as being the single Author of the Folio Plays without one documented evidence that Mr Shaxper was ‘Shake speare’.

Folio: That’s villainous and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.

It may be considered that a vindictive William ‘giving a piece of his own back’ and doing the job better, no, ‘far better’, would not ‘cohere’ with that ‘greater decorum’, ‘more subtlety’, and ‘insinuating grace’ that the ‘prudent and detached’ vision of William that the biographers would ‘wont to have’. If Jonson were ‘never a good actor, loud mouthed and ranting’, who gave him these leading roles ? If they think that Ben Jonson was ‘Loud mouthed and ranting’ when he acted, ‘Bellowing and Strutting’, how do they know how ‘William’ acted which they never describe as no one else has ever mentioned it ? Gentle William ? This ‘William’ is the one that the biographers insist that Greene was referring to, the actor who could ‘bumbast out a blank verse like the best of you’, Is this ranting, puffing Ben the same Ben who decried the unnatural manner of acting, the same Ben who was a classicist, with a scholar’s veneration for classical standardsRowse? says, “Nor do I think we need hesitate to see reflections of old Lord Burghley in old Polonius”. Lord Burlegh had given his son, Robert Cecil, some ‘Precepts’ that were in the same vernacular as those given to Laertes by Polonius in ‘Hamlet’. Who knew Lord Burlegh that intimately to know this in 1600 ?. Certainly not ‘William’, and Burlegh did not know William. He died in 1598. If it took someone within Burlegh’s circle to give the author a minute description of the man, that someone could tell anyone outside the inner circle. However, these same ‘precepts’ go much further back than Burlegh and both he and the Author could have had access to these older ‘precepts’. In the ‘pirated’ or previous version of Hamlet, it is not Polonius who bids the King to stand ‘unseen’ ‘in the study’ here ‘in the gallery’ to watch where Hamlet ‘comes poring upon a book’, as these lines are given to ‘Cor.’, ‘Cornelius’ or a ‘Courtier’?

How would anyone know that William and Kempe were at odds ? If this were documented, it would be more important than all the invented tales put together, as this would be the only evidence of how the man felt about anything. William was never ‘part owner’ and no actor in the company ever said that he knew him. Pearson says further: “In a Cambridge play called ‘The Return to Parnassus’ (1602), he (Kempe) is represented as saying to the students who are welcoming him home from his trip abroad: ‘is it not better to make a fool of the World (i.e, the Globe) as I have done, than to be fooled of the World as you scholars are ?’ Which reminds us of Greene’s complaint that the actors had produced a playwright who was putting the scholars out of business.”

Again and again the biographers misquote Greene in order to enhance the non existent career for William in 1592. Greene never mentioned ‘scholars’ or ‘playwrights’. Greene was addressing his message to his fellow playwrights but said only that actors were being paid more for acting their plays than the playwrights were being paid for writing them. Also, the play was called ‘The Return from (not ‘to’) Parnassus’ Jonson was the first English writer to edit and publish his own collected works which he did in 1616, and may have encouraged the printing of the Folio in 1623. Jonson wrote one verse for the Folio that was placed opposite to an engraving of ‘William’ by Martin Droeshout, about which Hesketh Pearson says (P167), that this ‘portrait’ was ‘painted’ in 1608 by Martin Droeshout senior, a Flemish artist “whose son was to make such a poor job of the engraving”. If there were an original ‘portrait’ from which he claims the son made an engraving, where is that more important original painting ?

In commenting upon the Players scene in Hamlet, Hesketh Pearson says that William in the words of Hamlet, is castigating Will Kempe who is accused of ‘gagging’, adding ad libs almost incessantly and ‘blabbering with his lips’, “thus getting on William’s nerves, caused more friction that usual between actor and author, Shakespeare was now part owner of a theatre where his plays were the chief popular attractions, and he could exercise considerable authority in it.”

Peter Quennell says, “Jonson was imprisoned and arraigned, but escaped the gallows by pleading ‘benefit of clergy’, that is to say, he read aloud in court and thus gave proof that he was an educated citizen. Nevertheless, his goods were declared forfeit and, as a mark of ignominy, his thumb was branded.”

There was no ‘original portrait’ as it has been discovered by computer comparison by woman during the late 1990’s that the engraving was made from a sketch that was drawn over an exact tracing of a portrait of Queen Elizabeth.

Not one of these foremost biographers gives the correct impression of ‘pleading clergy’. Quennell come close but still leaves the wrong impression. The Court already knew that Jonson was an educated citizen. Altogether, Jonson was imprisoned on four occasions. The Court, however, may have been unfamiliar with this play, ‘Every Man in his Humour’, that had been given performances, eleven in all, during the previous two or three weeks at the Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch. Not even Quennell’s footnote on the page gives the correct information:

After adversely criticizing Jonson for being boisterous, a heavy drinker, jealous and cantankerous, biographers, when it comes to their praise of William, consider him to be completely honest, a man of his word, and are shocked to have anyone suggest that he was ‘engaged in this elaborate conspiracy’ to invent a faked author.

For writing this, the author and actors, Jonson, Robert Shaw and Gabriel Spencer were thrown into gaol, Nashe had fled from arrest. The following year, Jonson had a quarrel with Spencer, a fellow actor and fellow prisoner, who had long been quarrelsome and had already killed a man in a barbershop. A Middlesex jury found that Jonson “feloniously and wilfully beat and struck the same Gabriel, giving then and there to the same Gabriel Spencer a mortal wound of the depth of six inches and the breadth of one inch, in and upon the right side. Of which mortal blow the same Gabriel Spencer then and there died instantly”. For this Jonson was again imprisoned. Biographers of William at this point all record that Ben escaped execution by pleading ‘clergy’ or ‘benefit of clergy’. Rowse says he “pleaded clergy, was nevertheless branded with the Tyburn mark on his thumb, and was thrown into prison”. Pearson says, “Released by benefit of clergy, he forfeited his ‘goods and chattels’ and was branded on his left thumb with the letter T (for Tyburn)”. Tyburn was a place of executions almost at the present day site of London’s Marble Arch, ironically near Hyde Park’s Speaker’s Corner, or is this why the font of free speech is situated there ?

Can these biographers believe that Jonson knew anything about the manuscripts of the plays that they say he honours, that he knew who wrote them and yet made no effort to see that man where he lived, that if he had known the man, he would not have taken a horse and ridden to Stratford, nay, walked if need be, to speak to him ? He had walked to Edinburgh to visit his friend William Drummond (“Ben Jonson’s Conversations with Drummond of Hawthorne”, edited by R.F. Patterson, 1923). William’s biographers pour forth such information as from Quennell:“Next came Jonson, still an almost unknown hireling the impoverished poet to whom in July of 1587, Henslowe lent 4 pounds and, in December, one pound on the security of a yet unfinished ‘book’, of which the poet had ‘showed the plot unto the company’. Jonson had previously worked for Pembroke’s Men, a short lived and unimportant company. In 1597, he had collaborated with Nashe upon a daring topical production called The Isle of Dogs, ‘a lewd play’, decided Council, ‘containing very seditious and slanderous matter’.”

“Established after the death of Thomas Becket in 1170, this privilege freed ‘clerks’ or clerics, from the jurisdiction of the royal courts, and was gradually extended, with modifications, to other educated first offenders. Since 1547, however, it had not protected murderers, highwaymen and housebreakers. Jonson’s offence was that of manslaughter. ‘Benefit of clergy’ was eventually abolished in 1827.”

To qualify for ‘benefit of clergy’, Jonson had to fulfill the requirements of the law as set down. He had to read aloud in open Court from anywhere in an opened Latin Bible. The encyclopaedia Britannica says: Jonson “escaped capital punishment by pleading ‘Benefit of Clergy’, the ability to read from the Latin Bible but could not escape branding. This, however, possibly through the help of friends, was done with a cold iron.” What, a cold branding iron ? With the secret assistance of loyal and grateful friends surreptitiously substituting a cold iron to save their admired playwright from enduring undeserved pain and everlasting ignominious shame, this clandestine and formidable hoax perpetrated by concealed persons engineering and devising a plot carried out by some innocent but well remunerated dupe to administer not a yellow hot brand but a cold iron ? Such is the wording used by those who doubt that ‘W. S.’ was a penname. Quennell asks about this ‘plot’ (Pxv), “Was Ben Jonson himself engaged in the elaborate conspiracy ? Did ‘loud mouthed’, ‘brawling’ Ben, ‘never a good actor’, when branded with the cold iron in the inner room, ‘bellow out’ a most pitiful cry with great conviction, using the acting method he did as Heironimo, to convince those in the farthest recesses of the reverberating prison that another wretch had felt the wrath of those several Superiors whom he dared mention in his seditious and slanderous theatrical scenes ?

again, “Jonson, scholar and poetic doctrinaire, whose gifts were harnessed to a predetermined theory; Shakespeare, who had developed through improvisation, and whose literary temperament, endlessly versatile and elastic, responded anew to each new set of difficulties, deriving rules from his solution of the problems he encountered rather than imposing them ready made upon his subject”.

The Court condemned Ben not for dispensing Spencer but for dispensing humour at their Excellencies expense. The biographers of William all compare Ben to William and Ben comes out the loser every time.

John Aubrey (1700) is quoted on Jonson, “I have heard Mr Lacy, the player say that he was wont to wear a coat like a coachman’s coat, with slits under the armpits. He would many times exceed in drink (Canary was his beloved liquor): then he would tumble home to bed, and when he had thoroughly perspired, then to study. I have seen his studying chair which was of straw, much as old women used….”

Quennell says (P193), “Of his visions and his misadventure in drink, as when Sir Walter Ralegh’s son, to whom he was acting as bear leader, loaded him dead drunk on to a hand cart and had him dragged around the streets of Paris.”

Another commentator says, how he had “consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, fight in his imagination”.Quennell

This comparison of Dyer, Bacon, Oxford and Ralegh with ‘William’, meaning always the Man in Stratford, is based upon feeding a Play’s words into the computer. The scientific experiment cannot by scientific rules assume that ‘To be or not to be’ are William’s words when the purpose of the experiment is to determine if they be or not. What are ‘William’s’ words ? Do they compare the words that a ‘William’, claimed to be the Stratford William, uttered at the Mountjoy Bellott trial in London and were taken down in court records, or the opinions of William as related to Quiney or Thomas Greene about whether he would lend money of take action on the Welcome enclosure ? These words are at least attested to by very close associates but are still not exactly his words. Whoever of his neighbours said, “I, vpon entering his room, did finde him there poring vpon a booke from whence he did writ vpon his parchment wile I did heare him say, ‘To dreme, Ay, there’s the rub’ whervpon I, being puzzled, did ask what he meant by ‘rub’ and he replyed , ‘Ay, marry, There it goes.’ And he did blot out vpon his parchment his former word and did writ in his latter three.”

Some comparisons of William to Ben made by some biographers of Ben are rarely if ever seen in biographies of ‘William’. William “treated his manuscripts with contemptuous carelessness”. Jonson “diligently edited and revised his own works”. William “showed no inclination to found a clique of school”. Ben was “naturally qualified to teach and lead” the ‘tribe of Ben’ and, as one of the disciples, Lucius Cary, Second Viscount Falkland (1610 1643), poet, statesman and soldier, wrote of Ben:

The whole of the ‘Shakespeare Solution’ is in that sentence. Jonson is demoted with the words, ‘doctrinaire’ and ‘predetermined theory’, while William is raised with ‘elastic’, ‘versatile’, ’solution’ and ’anew’. Whatever William does is ‘improvisation’, but the question remains which innovation did ‘William’ write, which ‘Hamlet’ receives the mark of acceptance ?

Which version of ‘Hamlet’ is fed into the computer ? In comparing who wrote the Folio version and who wrote the Quarto version, what would be the control text ? Did they put ‘Julius Caesar’ through the impugner and find that Plutarch wrote most of it, as did Holished with Richard III ?! Enter in ‘what you will’ and interpret it ‘as you like it’ Abracad abacus ! Garbage out ! Much ado about ‘Nothing and One’

If the Folio version is the results of ‘improvisation’, what produced the often clearer, simpler, and less involved, less tongue tripping Quarto version ?

When asked why he ran from his house and just drove the highways for hours after hearing that the ‘Martians had landed’ while listening to the Orson Welles 1938 ‘War of the Worlds’ broadcast without checking other radio stations, the man replied, “Because the man on the radio reporting it said that he was a university professor.” No further questions, your honour.

“The top claimants tested were the Earl of Oxford, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Edward Dyer, Queen Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh.” It took a computer program, ‘what goes in, comes back out’, to see the difference between ‘King Lear’ and Queen Elizabeth’s writing ! Francis Bacon wrote on legal and other topics in his essays and Ralegh wrote on scientific experiments and the history of the world. The essence of comparison is in ‘the relationship between words’ not just the words used. Why would these not show up to be foreign to ‘remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, bawdy villain !”

Read all about it: “Shakespeare rediscovered by massive computer analysis”. Give me that paper, boy. What is this ? “A computer program that was fed more than three million words by William Shakespeare and other Elizabethan authors has shown the Bard alone wrote his works, a university professor has decided.”

Ben, as he told Drummond, had a wife who was ‘a shrew yet honest’. William probably had, too, a shrewish but honest wife, but he never mentioned her as William mentioned no one. Ben had a son who died very young and to whom he dedicated the verse: ‘Rest in soft peace; and ask’d, say here doth lie Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry’. So did William of Stratford have a son die young but he wrote nothing.

‘He had an infant’s innocence and truth, The judgement of grey hairs, the wit of youth, And both of them might wonder to discern His ableness to teach, his skill to learn’.

In the walking tour that Ben made to see William Drummond in 1618 1619 that took him to Edinburgh, Ben was made honorary Burgess and Guild Master at the university, and he received the Honorary Master of Arts degree at Oxford on returning to England. Drummond recorded that, “He said he was Master of Arts in both universities by favour not by study”. Poetry “had beggared him, where he might have been a rich lawyer, physician or merchant”.

Drummond reports that Ben said that William “needed art”, that “Donne was the first poet in the world for some things” but “for not keeping the accent, deserved hanging” and “for not being understood would perish”. In 1603, when he wrote ‘Sejanus’, Jonson was called before the Privy Council when the play seemed to echo the fall of Essex. In 1605, his ‘Eastward Ho’ brought him more trouble, yet when called in by the Privy Council, it made him a ‘spy’ to contact a priest to find information regarding the Gunpowder Plot. William owned the property adjacent to where the collaborators in the Plot held meetings, yet William was never asked about anything or to be a spy.

Jonson was not a University student but learning was in his plays. He was a master of theatrical plot, language and characterization, his plays, still staged during the Restoration, were inspiration to its authors, then they fell into neglect in the 18th century. He wrote ‘Sejanus’, ‘Volpone’ and ‘The Alchemist’ for the Kings’ Men, ‘Westward Ho!’ and ‘Ephocine’ for the Children of the Chapel Royal and ‘Bartholomew Fair’ for the Lady Elizabeth Company. All of the plays that he wrote for Henslowe are now known by title only except for ‘The Case of the Altered’. ‘Cataline’ and ‘Every Man out of his Humour’ were brilliant but a disaster at the Burbadge box office. From then on he wrote for the private theatres where the higher price of admission made a more appreciative audience, a select audience for his satire, ‘Cynthia’s Revels’, ‘Poetaster’, to voice his contempt for human behaviour and his longing for human order. His ‘humours’ were the Medieval and Renaissance medicine terms of cholea, melancholy, phlegm and blood, thought to determine the physical and mental make up of human beings. Today’s terms for the same, or are they already yesterday’s terms, ‘introvert and extrovert’, ‘schizoid and cyclothymic’, ‘celebrotonic’ and ‘viscerotonic’. In 1612, Sir Walter Ralegh while a prisoner in the Tower, made Jonson his son’s tutor for a visit to the continent but biographers of William tell only about the incident in Paris with the wheelbarrow. There were also two widely differing versions of Ben Jonson’s first great play, ‘Every Man in his Humour’. The version that was produced in 1598, whether or not it was the same version as plays at the Rose in 1597, and which was printed in 1601 in Quarto, was not the ‘considerably re written version’ that appeared in his Folio of 1616 with an added Prologue in which Jonson boldly blasts the inanities that he felt were included in the plays produced by the Lord Chamberlain, his servaunts, which . . .

11 “ . . . . .

The other but authentic source of Ben’s thoughts about William is almost a well kept secret. The phrases that are quoted are usually given with the impression that Ben voiced them so that they had a listening ear or a reading eye, whereas these comments were known when they were found in his effects and were printed in 1641 four years after Ben’s death. These comments were found on notes in a drawer and man y were printed in a book ‘Timber; or Discoveries’, Made upon Man and Matter’. Jonson was a professor of rhetoric at Gresham College later in his life, and these ‘notes’ may have been jotted down, as the possible basis for or for inclusion in his lectures. In them Jonson reveals his thoughts on drama and poetry, and he makes observations on life and letters, expressing the value he placed on his reading. In the book is included his ‘The English Grammar’.

..with three rusty swords, And help of some few foot and half foot words, Fight over York and Lancaster’s long jars: And in the tiring house bring wounds to scars. Where neither Chorus wafts you o’er the seas; Nor creaking throne comes down, the boys to please; Nor nimble squib is seen, to make afear’d The gentlewomen; nor rolled bullet heard To say it thunders; nor tempestuous drum Rumbles, to tell you when the storm doth come.”

But Ben would rather see and hear upon the stage:“But deed and language, such as men do use: And persons, such as Comedy would choose, When she would show an image of the times, And sport with human follies, not with crimes.”

Ben Jonson, in order to have pointed out so many of these ‘silly things’ in the Plays, ‘Caesar does no wrong, except with good reason’, must have examined and read the Plays most carefully and must have been familiar with their construction. Did Jonson read the Folio version before it was printed ? His ‘tribute’ was published in the Folio and he must have submitted it long before the time for printing. Did he know that Caesar’s words had been altered to avoid the error that he pointed out ? He must have been familiar with the Quarto version of Hamlet and now would read the Folio version. Did he pick up one and throw down the other saying, “This is a bag of horse feathers !” Gabriel Harvey, Spenser’s friend said, “The younger sort takes delight in Venus and Adonis: but his Lucrece and his tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, have it in them to please the wiser sort”. Gabriel, blow your horn, you have just praised, and justly so, the only text that you knew of Hamlet, the Quarto version of 1603 !

In writing of Jonson’s ‘relationship’ to William, biographers of William do not fully make plain that the stories about Ben and William are mostly from Thomas Fuller’s ‘History of the Worthies of England’ that repeated hearsay and old ‘jeasts’ that were reworded to include Ben and Will in place of the originals that predated both of them. These were gathered or newly manufactured after the Restoration when interest in the Plays was restored. This collection includes the accounts of supposed ‘battle of wits’ between the two in tavern sessions and of William’s oft repeated personal ‘discovery’ of Ben’s writing abilities.

A paragraph from this book notes Jonson’s ‘recollections’ of ‘W.S.’. That the biographers give misleading references regarding this paragraph in the book is evident in Hesketh Pearson’s introduction to it (P109):“And after Shakespeare’s death, he paid a handsome tribute in poetry and a more personal tribute in prose, wherein we can detect the voice of the pedant.”

This statement is true but misleading. Jonson paid ‘a tribute in poetry’ printed in the Folio under the title, ‘To the memory of my beloved, the Author, Mr William Shakespeare’, but the ‘tribute in prose’ was unknown to the public until 1641. The paragraph, although printed in its entirety only rarely, is never interpreted except in its brief excerpts that the biographers use for differing purposes. Pearson quotes most of the entire paragraph but does not point out where he finds Jonson a ‘pedant’. Where in Jonson’s paragraph can it be found of Jonson “making a needless display of his learning” and where is his “insistence upon the importance of trifling points of scholarship”, statements that Pearson makes in his book ? Jonson wrote “I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in this writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted out a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech. I had not told posterity this, but for their ignorance, who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, wherein he most faulted. And to justify mine own candour (for I loved the man and so honour his memory on this side idolatry as much as any). He was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature: he had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions: wherein he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped. Yet he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned.”

Jonson explains his comment ‘would he had blotted out a thousand’ which he did not intend as ‘malevolent’ but whatever he said to the players was in private and he still does not admit to knowing a man but only the words of a man. Ben did not set down these words intending them to be printed for public knowledge. The Encyclopaedia Britannica states that Ben is to have “acknowledged a belief that he (William) was on occasion ‘full of wind’”. The phrase that Ben used was ‘sufflaminandus’, but William, he said, ‘had little Latin’. The ‘mystery’ of Ben Jonson is whether be believed that William of Stratford did pen these plays that he criticized. Ben said, “In his writing (whatsoever he penned)”. Does this imply that he understood that William wrote only parts of plays or that he rewrote plays from other versions? Did Ben wonder that there were no blots on the ‘papers’ and did he doubt that this could be so, as many biographers do not believe this, as ‘this can’t be strictly true’ said one. Of which of the two versions of Hamlet was Ben speaking, and which Julius Caesar ? Does he believe that all of the Plays in the Folio should have been credited to William and did he know something that no one in five hundred years is able to guess, that no one theory fits all of the evidence, that there is no one definite version of Hamlet, that there was no one author of any of these plays, that the author was certainly not Francis Bacon, nor De Vere, Ralegh or Spenser, that the most logical author of the plays, the most similar in subjects chosen, in style and approach, the most experienced and of the correct age was Christopher Marlowe, and that, if he were not ‘killed’ in 1593, but went the Edinburgh where he, provided with anonymity, protection and patronage, continued to write plays of his own choosing that were delivered by another party to the London theatre of the Burbadges but that this still would not explain the vastly different versions of Hamlet and probably of the others.

Did Ben Jonson know the answer to these questions ? No one until after 1623 came forward with any information that they even guessed that a William in Stratford wrote the Plays. No logical explanation is forwarded as to why the Quarto is different than the Folio as calling the Quarto a ‘pirated copy’ is no explanation. To say that an actor or anyone ‘remembereth the words’ of the play and set them down incorrectly is inexcusable. To pass off the Quarto versions that obviously differ from the Folio’s but which were produced on stage, as a ‘garbled’ version is ignoring their significance. Why are the Folio versions hailed as the ‘original’, ‘untouched’, ‘as he intended them’ when at least some of them were not produced on stage in those versions decades earlier. No printer would have the incentive, a reason or the ability to reword almost the entire play of ‘Hamlet’ as the Quarto differs from the Folio.

No one referred to the author of the Plays as a person that they knew before or after 1616. Only the First Folio and several Quartos referred to one 'S' but not as a person known to anyone.After 1623, no one connected the author with William of Stratford, only that it was understood that the 'Great Poet' was buried in the Church at Stratford.

No one referred to William of Stratford during his lifetime. Ferreted out 'references' such as from poets can be demonstrated to be false.

No biographer journeyed to Stratford to learn any facts about William of Stratford or 'S' during the 17th century or the 18th century. Neither ‘biographers’ Aubrey nor Rowe nor Betterton made such a journey to Stratford. In the 18th century, no biographer added any factual information to the biography of Nicholas Rowe who followed the trend of the times in accepting legends that were invented entirely or in many cases reworked from older stories or jests about other people. Anecdotes were invented linking 'S' with Jonson and Burbadge. No one journeyed to Stratford to learn information.Oneman during the 19th century did make a personal survey of Stratford and the surrounding area to find any remnants of a library of books or papers that may have belonged to 'S'. Finding none, he wrote of his conclusion that 'William of Stratford' could not have written the Plays but later he had all his papers burned for he feared being ridiculed for his findings so entrenched was the idea that this man was the author without anyone else either taking the initiative to find any true connection of the man to the Plays or ever expressing any doubt that he was theNoAuthor.biographer in the 18th century including Samuel Johnson who only reprinted or retold hearsay and legends told to him or printed by former editors of the Plays ever made any attempt at finding any factual evidence of who 'S' actually was or any information about William of Stratford.Only one person made a personal journey and an intense effort to find documented information in or about Stratford, and although all of his findings dealt with the personal business of William and none of it showed the slightest connection with any writing whatever. He still assumed that he was learning facts about the author of the plays. Others of the same period made forgeries and claimed that they revealed facts about the author, or about William of Stratford that would associate him with the Plays. In the latter part of the Victorian Age other biographers wrote copious amounts of erroneous statements linking William of Stratford with the Plays and with well known and documented figures of Elizabethan times for which there is no evidence to substantiate them whatever. Many of the statements prove to be impossible chronologically, and others conflict with known facts. In the 20th century a full and thorough search for documents of that period of 1562 to 1616 was made at Stratford by Mark Eccles and not one of his findings concerned writing or acting nor did they have any relation to literature, books or the Theatre in London.

NO ONE REFERRED TO WILLIAM Robert J. Meyer

On the printing of anything under the name of William Shakespeare, William himself, the landholder of Stratford, is silent. The acting companies in producing these contested plays from the three parts of Henry VI, possibly 1591, did so for ten years before the general public had any evidence of anyone being credited with being the author. The great heroes portrayed on stage, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet and King Lear, were as one with the person who brought them to life and that person was Richard Burbadge.

The greatest objection to the argument ‘that Shakespeare could not have composed the majestic works attributed to him’ is that this would have been ‘a formidable hoax one of the most extraordinary ever perpetrated’ and would have been easily exposed by those people in the theatre who knew William.

What was there to expose ? In the years of William’s lifetime, only seven plays were written that were credited on the title pages as being by ‘Shakespeare’. However, the first of these seven plays was not printed until 1603, years after the time when he is now considered to have begun writing plays. During his lifetime another eight of the 36 Folio plays were printed in Quarto that credited no one as the author. During William’s lifetime, several other plays were printed and credited to ‘Shake speare’ but were not by that name, and at the time of printing, it may or may not have been known they were not by that name. “Loues Labore Lost” (‘Love’s Labors Lost’) was printed in 1598 as being ‘corrected and augmented by ‘W.S’’. Two long poems were published, ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, that bore his name under the ‘Dedication’ on a separate page from the title page, which did not acknowledge that he wrote them, he claimed them as being his own on the Dedication page and he also claimed that ‘Venus’ was ‘the first heir of my invention’ published in 1593. ‘The Sonnets’ also were printed in William of Stratford’s lifetime and credited to ‘William Shakespeare’, but there were two or three other collections of poems and plays that were also credited as being ‘by William Shakespeare’ but were known at the time not to be by that name. All of the 36 plays found in the First Folio were produced on the stage during William’s lifetime, seemingly, but at the time of production, there were no credits given as to who the author was and so for at least ten years, these plays were being attended with no public knowledge of who the author was with little or no curiosity. Many other plays by ‘other’ authors were produced without credit for authorship. The production of plays at the theatres and the sale of plays in Quarto form at the booksellers were two separate worlds. Some of the seven or eight plays bearing that name were printed years after the time of the first productions on the stage and those seven somewhat obscure printings of the name in seven Quartos at the ‘Sign of the Griffen’ or wherever they were sold had little effect upon the play going or play reading public. The printing of his name in books that he admittedly had no part in creating also had no effect upon the reading public. It did not seem to matter to the public as to the authenticity of those credits until long after the printing of the First Folio, not until the Restoration of Theatre in 1660.

THE NONEXISTENT HOAX Robert J. Meyer

No writer in William’s day commented upon his being a playwright. The entire amount of reference to William was in praise, or in satire, of the two long poems that were to some degree ‘best sellers’ for a short time. In none of these references during William of Stratford’s lifetime was there a recognized association between the name on the Dedications of those two long poems and any living poet that anyone has attested to having known personally.

What was the need for any extraordinary ‘hoax’ that required elaborate engineering in precisely devising a complex plan extremely difficult to carry out ? Where was the necessity in saying anything about where the plays were originating or who wrote them ? If a member of the company had written them, why were they not credited to him from the beginning and constantly through the years as Marlowe and the other playwrights had been by his company owner ? Why were some printed in versions quite different than those in the Folios and then denounced as ‘maimed and deformed by...impostors’ when the company manager, Richard Burbadge, would have, if not complete ownership, sole authority to choose to print them? Why were they not rejected as spurious by Burbadge long before the claim made in 1632 ? Why were any plays after the first also allowed to be printed fraudulently, some credited to ‘William Shakespeare’ and some not? Why are any of the Plays printed crediting them to someone who did not write them, without complaint from any author? Why was the name ‘Foul Papers’ invented in a later century to cover original manuscripts that were not corrected and revised when the claim was made in 1632 that the original papers were presented without blemish ?

There was no objection from anyone called William to any Quarto that was printed without his name on it. There was an objection to one book with his name credited on it. In publishing a collection of poems entitled ‘The Passionate Pilgrime’, Jaggard, the printer, included some poems from ‘Loue’s Labore Lost’ and also some poems from several other writers for which Jaggard claimed that they were ‘by W. Shakespeare’. Thomas Heywood complained when Jaggard included one of Heywood’s poems in a second edition of the book that still bore the credit of “by W. Shakespeare”. Why is there this confusion of some plays being credited but later not credited to the ‘name’ of ‘Shake speare’ ? Why were many other plays allowed to be credited to him long after the publishing of the 1623 and 1632 Folios ? Why are there no similar quandaries regarding the work of other playwrights of the time when it is known that other authors wrote plays with the same of similar titles that are within the Folios ? Why are there so many of these similarly named plays now claimed to be ‘lost’ ?

The ‘Originals’ were the manuscripts or hand written copies that were in the hands of the publishers of the First Folio of 1623. There had to be ‘originals’ that were made by the author or ‘copies’ made by others of the 36 plays in existence in 1623 from which to assemble the First Folio. Each of these had to be up to 32 years old or ‘copies’ made from ‘originals that were written as early as 1591 as some historians claim.

“This is the first poem in blank verse, a form Surrey devised in order to meet the rhymeless challenge of Virgil’s hexameters. . .But blank verse was there, waiting, seven years before Shakespeare’s birth, and it might not have been there if Englishmen had not esteemed the classics so highly that they wanted to turn them into English poetry.” (from “Shakespeare’ by Anthony Burgess)

THE ‘ORIGINAL’ MANUSCRIPTS Robert J. Meyer

Of the number of possibilities of what happened to these ‘Originals’ include that the ‘Originals’ were simply ‘lost’, they were destroyed accidentally or deliberately, but some ‘may’ still exist and are not as yet discovered or are not known to be the ‘Originals’. What are the chances of any of these possibilities ? The claim that only 36 definite ‘original manuscripts’ or copies existed at the time of the First Folio’s 1623 publication does not seem reasonable. There must have been several copies if not the original manuscripts for at least some of the plays. It would be assumed that the brothers Burbadge would have had many copies that were used, making it unlikely that every portion was ‘simply lost’. This would mean that no one took sufficient care to preserve them since 1623. Then, which version was used to produce the plays after 1623, the one that the players already had or the Folio version that would require new copies to be made for the players ? The publication itself would have raised wide interest in every scrap of paper connected with the plays of the man who is so extravagantly praised in the Folio by the Poet Laureate, Ben Jonson, or was there that much adulation as before 1623 there was no such praise or any personal testimony regarding the author in print, only brief popularity for the name associated with the two particular poems. Thomas Heywood’s published praise of the author came much later in 1635. The stationers or printers, Isaac and William Jaggard, and particularly Edward Blount, one of the three publishers, were widely experienced men in the publication of what are still landmark printings, the earliest introductions of the works of Lucan, Ovid, and Montaigne to the English language and to the shaping of English poetry, prose and philosophy. They were following in the established tradition of publishers that had set their standards very high with the Earl of Surrey’s ‘Certain Bokes of Virgiles Aeneis’, published in 1557. This book “already produced an experimental metric that was to transform the whole face of English literature and make possible Elizabethan drama as we know it”. “They whisted all, with fixed fact attent When Prince Aeneas from the royal seat Thus gan to speak, O Queene, it is thy will, I should renew a woe can not be told: How that the Grekes did spoile and overthrow The Phrygian wealth, and wailful realm of Troy, Those ruthful things that I myself beheld.”

What happened to these ‘Originals’ that were in the hands of the publishers, two men who ‘possessed the rights in a number of the plays’, John Smethwick and William Apsley, along with Edward Blount, who published Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander’ and dedicated it to Marlowe’s patron Thomas Walsingham, and who published Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s ‘Essays’ and one of Leonard Digges’ translations, and made available to Thorpe for publication of Christopher Marlowe’s translation of the First Book of Lucan’s ‘Pharsalia’ ?

The printers, the Jaggard brothers, were men who knew what they held in their hands. They were Englishmen who knew the classics. They were part of the Stationers’ Company headed in 1622 by the Master Stationer, Richard Field, who also carried on that English tradition. He took over the printing firm where he apprenticed in Blackfriars’ Close that had a monopoly on classic texts for schools that included Ovid, Cicero, Manutius’s Phrases and ‘Plutarch’s Lives’, the historical source for ‘Julius Caesar’ and other plays. Field’s first publication as owner of the firm was George Puttenham’s ‘Arte of English Poesie’, the foremost book on literary criticism, 1589, and he published a translation of Du Bartas’ ‘Divine Weeks and Works’, 1592. His firm also published ‘Campo de Fior’, a handbook for learning Italian and French. All of the phrases in Italian in the Plays are said to have been in this book, Sir Thomas North’s translation, which was followed so closely in the Roman Plays of the Folio.

Why would not these publishers, Blount, Smethwick and Apsley, have ensured the preservation of these plays in their possession ? That the ‘Originals’ were deliberately destroyed is the easiest solution, but it would be necessary, and possible, that a very few interested or selected persons were in a position to collect and did collect all of the originals and thereby had control over their possession the entire time from the beginning whenever that date was and for over 30 years. With this control, this select few had the opportunity to decide what would be the fate of the papers. They could decide which plays would be published if at all and in which form, which original passages to be left intact, revisions made, lines excised, characters added or deleted. They would have control over whether the ‘Originals’ would be left for posterity. By eliminating the ‘original’ manuscripts by the Author and the ‘Originals’ taken to the printers they could control to whom the plays would be attributed as author. For this enterprise, the three ‘Collectors’ must have had a purpose from the beginning. This ‘beginning’ was ‘early’ in order to control all the copies, or the ‘beginning’ was ‘later’ when their reason for the collecting became apparent. ‘Authenticity’ of the Plays is attested only by their inclusion in the First Folio. All previous and subsequent plays attributed in print to the name ‘W.S.’ are not recognized as being the work of the author of the Folio plays. All the texts in earlier Quarto editions of the Plays are now measured by comparison to the Folio versions and any varying from them are called ’pirated’ versions or the results of ‘faulty memories’. Yet it is never explained satisfactorily how a ‘pirated’ version of ‘Hamlet’ can be so different, yet show greatness in its simplicity, its directness of meaning, its easily understood lines, a verse of great beauty to enunciate or to have fall upon the ear. To say, as do the modern biographers of William, that ‘it was printed without permission’ is to bid a reply of ‘from whom’, the Author, the Company or the ‘Collectors’ ? Say the critics, the ‘printer got his hands on a copy from some actors in the Company’. Were these copies entire plays or were they, as some biographers claim, separate parts that each actor was loaned only while learning his part ? Someone, then, would pilfer a part here, another part there, and when all parts were purloined, someone laid them all out and then tried to decipher which character spoke first and which second and this might result in a jumble of parts. However, there is no jumble of lines, no characters speaking before their cue in the ‘pirated’ version of ‘Hamlet’. This has been labelled a ‘mangled’ version in today’s biographies, but there is no mangling of meaning or motive in the story line. The wordings differ but the wording should not be different if the printer compiled in his type setting the various ‘parts’ that were before him. He may make an error in spelling but all of the original manuscripts were in the spelling of that day as Simon Forman’s review of ‘Macbeth’ demonstrates. It is not the spelling that is different. The first Folio, itself, had been called ‘one of the worst printed books ever issued’, by a 19th century critic while another claimed that the First Folio contained 20,000 errors. The ‘pirated’ version of ‘Hamlet’ makes more sense is many sections than does the version in the First Folio.

Richard Burbadge was not chosen to publish the Plays but like so many other members of the acting company, he died before 1623, Will Kemp in 1603, Thomas Pope in 1604, Augustine Phillips in 1605, William Sly in 1608, Robert Armin who replaced Kemp, 1615, Richard Crowley in 1618, Richard Burbadge in 1619 and Nicholas To1oley died just months before the publication in 1623. Between 1616 and 1632, remaining company owner Cuthbert Burbadge and actors John Heminges and Henry Condell died and so the latter two knew nothing of the ‘Dedication’ and ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ printed over their names in the 1632 Folio.

Supposing that some players did write out or dictate from memory their parts for a ’pirating’ printer. What they remembered they would remember correctly having played the part several times just before the dictation and this would be the accepted version and would not be as different as the ‘pirated’ version of ‘Hamlet’ is from the Folio version. This ‘pirated’ version is pristine, precise, and of great beauty, some might argue that it is cleaner, less over embellished than the accepted version when comparing the two. “To be or not be, I [Aye] there’s the point. To die, to sleepe, is that all ? I all.”

The reasons given for the ‘pirated’ plays are not constant and do not stand under examination. There is always a new ‘reason’ for each new incident that arises in the biographies of William that have clung to the tradition of idolization of the ‘Bard’. A bard is a poet, particularly a Celtic poet or minstrel and the name was never used to describe the author until after1700. Biographers never identify the originator of the phrase, ‘Bard of Avon’. No one else of the many excellent poets of the time was ever exalted to the reverence of ‘the Bard’.

Modern biographers claim that actors copied out their parts or dictated them from memory for ‘pirated’ versions. Yet Marlowe wasted no time in seeing his own ‘Faustus’ in publication several years before anyone had seen the name ‘Shakespeare’ as all that Marlowe ever wrote was before that name was ever printed. Having read more about his subject between the time of staging the play and printing it, Marlowe made a new edition, adding a considerable number of lines to the stage version. Marlowe was publishing for the eye differently than he had seen produced on stage for the ear. Ben Jonson at the age of 40 in 1613 took great care in editing and supervising the publication of his own collected works at a time when he was not finished with his playwriting. Yet, one biographer says that William ‘could not be bothered’ printing any play.

The Company, the theatre buildings, the Globe and the Blackfriars were managed by Richard Burbadge and his brother, Cuthbert, who inherited all from their father, James who formed the company out of the old Theatre in Shoreditch years before and they managed the company throughout the time of all the patrons, Ferdinando, Henry Carey, Lord Hudson, Lord Strange, the Lord Chamberlain and finally, James the King, for whom the company was called ‘The King’s Men’. James Burbadge. the father, died three years after the formation of the Lord Chamberlain’s players in 1594. All of the plays, it would seem, came through the possession of the Burbadge family, James, Cuthbert and Richard. According to biographers, playwrights sold their plays to the theatre company owners and they, in turn, protected them from other theatre company owners. There could be no secrets from Richard’s brother Cuthbert, who originally owned the company with his father, James, before Richard took over the management in 1597. Little is ever mentioned about Cuthbert in the biographies. He purchased the Blackfriars theatre building and leased it out before his company used it for producing plays. Cuthbert was the business manager and would be privy to any decision to publish a play or to ‘sell’ it to a publisher.

Biographer A.L. Rowse relates the story of ‘Burby’ from his 1963 book, Page 282.

When the printer, or more possibly the printer’s apprentice, asked the gentleman’s name that would be placed upon the title page as the publisher, the conversation may have been: Burbadge: “I trust that your printer will produce an excellent Quarto.”

It is odd that biographer, A.L. Rowse, in the indexes of his 1963 and 1973 biographies of ‘Shakespeare’, lists ‘Burby, Cutbert, stationer’, separately from ‘Burbadge, Cuthbert’ as if he considers them to be two persons or as if he does not recognize the usual manner of not spelling a name in the same way even in the same paragraph. Spelling of a name varied according to how a person heard the name in speech, and all do not hear speech exactly in the same way. Several plays were attributed to ‘Cutbert Burby’ as publisher as in the title pages of some early printings. ‘Cutbert Burby’ had every authority to publish a play if the Burbadges decided to do so. Unless someone has other proof that there was a man named ‘Cutbert Burby’ who published plays in the possession of Cuthbert Burbadge, a strange coincidence of similar sounding names never mentioned by any of the 20th century biographers included the foremost, A.L. Rowse, then it is more likely that Cuthbert Burbadge was the publisher. ‘Burbadge’ is the manner in which the family spelled it

“Shakespeare’s established position with the public is reflected in an increasing state in the publication of his plays from this time. In 1597, Cuthbert Burby, who had already brought out a bad Quarto of Taming of the Shrew in 1594, now produced a poor version of Romeo and Juliet, put together from memory. In those days an author had no copyright protection, so two years later, Shakespeare had to content himself with issuing a good version ‘newly corrected, augmented and amended’ through the same Burby.”

There is no evidence that William ever published any play and so Rowse is inventing this and he does not explain why someone other than a Burbadge would have possession of the play as it is always stated that the owners protected their plays and that they never sold any play as all Quartos were ‘stolen’ However, here is printed evidence that the publisher was ‘Cutbert Burby’ and so another excuse has to be given that opposes all previous explanations. Whether ‘Burby’ is Burbadge or not, how would ‘W.S.’ have anything to do with the publication when they say that he ‘could not be bothered’ with the printing ? If William were the one who would be ‘issuing a good version’ why would he need anyone to go ‘through’ and if he did why would he depend upon ‘Burby’ if Burby produced ‘poor’ and ‘bad Quartos’ ? Rowse possibly depends upon seeing Burby as a real person so that he does not have to explain why a Burbadge is publishing a play as all biographers claim that none was sold by the Burbadges but that Quartos were ‘stolen’ or ‘put together from memory’.

Printer; “Wot you say ?”

App: ”Oh, yez, Zir. We can do that juz fine, Zir. Now, what be yer name, Zir ?”

App: (at the other side of the noisy room) “Cuthbert BUR baydge.”

App: “Cuthbert BURR baydge”

App: “An’ oo’s name zhall we put down as publisher, Zir ? Bur “My name”. (Later the next day) Printer: “Wot did ‘e say ‘iz name woz ?”

Print: “Oh, Cutbert BURR bee, you say ! All roight, ‘Cutbert Burby’ it is.”

Bur: “Cuthbert Burbadge.”

Yet, no Quarto printing of ‘Romeo’ ever was credited to William on any page. The ‘good’ text of ‘Loues Labore Lost’ did not say ‘newly corrected, augmented and amended’ as it said ‘newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespeare’, and the publisher was ‘Cutbert Burby’ and not ‘Cuthbert Burby’ as Rowse continues to name him. Why would an author ‘correct’ a poor version ? Would it not be simpler for the author to publish his ‘original’ and ‘true’ play that he has written ? This is an admission that someone had corrected and added to the play that was the original. How is it that no one mentions this same continuous confusion with the plays of any other author ? None of these pronouncements by the biographers make any sense by naming a ‘Cutbert Burby’ as co owner and business manager of the company as was Cuthbert Burbadge.

What is it about this ‘William Shake speare’ that he has ‘little or no time’ to publish his own plays or that he ‘couldn’t be bothered’ with it ? Then further on the page, he is ready to ‘correct’, ‘augment’ and amend’ a ‘poor’ ‘copy’.

Nashe, Greene, Dekker and the rest were writing out pamphlets and broadsides to be rushed to the printers in between the plays that they wrote, some acted upon the stage occasionally. They met together, argued and discussed the world with their companions other than theatre people, broke bread and quaffed together, languished in prison the odd time but this ‘William’, who is not known for quaffing, arguing or talking with anyone and certainly not spending time in the gaol, is ‘too busy’, ‘could not be bothered’ to have a play published. The real reason may have been that he was ‘too busy’ lending money at ‘six in the hundred’ at Leadenhill or standing on his favourite corner by the ‘stocks’ where miscreants spent the day with their arms and legs locked for onlookers to leer at.

After having published a ‘bad’ Quarto of the ‘Shrew’ in 1594, a ‘poor’ version of ‘Romeo’ in 1597, ‘naughty Burby’ now ‘had got hold of’ [or ‘had gotten hold of’ or better, ‘had acquired’] a ‘bad text’ of ‘Loues Labore Lost’ in 1598. Elsewhere it is stated that the theatre companies closely guarded their manuscripts and copies lest the competition produce the plays and attract customers possibly with a better performance with Ned Alleyn. From where are all these wretched versions coming ? Rowse says that the ‘poor’ version of ‘Romeo’ was followed by a ‘good one’ ‘evidently from within the company’. Evidently, he believes that William was within the company, yet he went ‘through the same’ ‘naughty Burby’ ‘to content himself with issuing a good version’ of ‘Romeo’.

Where is the basis for saying, “Shakespeare’s established position with the public” when the first play ever published with the name ‘W Shakespere’ was ‘Loues Labore Lost’ in 1598, not 1594 or 1597, and the public had only the printed claim that the play was ‘Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere’, and no one knew if the ‘W’ stood for Wilfred, Warner or Willobie. From his 1973 book on William, A.L. Rowse says: “The position with regard to copyright was different in those days: if a publisher got hold of a manuscript and published it, the author had no remedy, except to publish a better version. This was done with Romeo and Juliet, of which Cuthbert Burby produced a poor version assembled from memory in 1597; this was followed by a good one, ‘newly corrected, augmented and amended’, evidently from within the company. This same year Andrew Wise printed a good text of the ever-popular Richard III. Wise also issued a good text of I Henry IV close on the heels of its performance; since the naughty Burby had got hold of a bad text of Loues Labore Lost, it was offset by a good one also ‘newly correctly, augmented and amended’. These issues gave opportunity for revision and improvements; the important point here is that there was a reading public avid for the plays, though the dramatist had little or no time to attend to it.”

The ‘Collectors’ would then need to have the name of a person who would not object to his name being used as an author of some poems and if there were no great reaction or no inquiries to the trial publications, a play or two could appear in Quarto form with the name credited only as an ‘augmenter’ or an editor or ‘corrector’. Later again, if all went well, and there were no undue reactions such as a total unbelief or denial that the person named could be the author, his name could be printed now just below the title in the usual place for the first time in any following publication. This is what happened even if not for these purposes.

The ‘Collectors’ did not regard this play or ‘Pericles’ as having been co authored by their ‘man’

‘Collectors’ authenticated 18 previously unpublished plays but they did not include ‘Pericles’ or ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’. The latter play was written by John Fletcher but William’s name was printed along with Fletcher’s on the title page when it was published in 1634 but Professor Leech in his ‘John Fletcher’s Play’s, P.162, says: “But there is not, I think, a single play in the Beaumont and Fletcher Folios which does not display Shakespearian echoes”.

If the purpose of the ‘Collectors’ were to preserve the continued output of their author without revealing who that author was, then they had to find an outlet for the author’s plays to be produced and finally to have those plays published for posterity. If their author could not be identified for reasons of his safety, the plays would have to be performed without crediting anyone. However, to stage several plays to considerable success as was expected, it might raise suspicion in some circles to have a series of plays having success but never to reveal the name of the author. Obviously, the plays would have the mark of one author and could not be presented as the works of two or three authors, none of whom wished their real names to be known. It was essential to the ‘Collectors’ purpose that they not have any suspicions raised or questions asked.

The real William of Stratford, from stories true or false, he ‘was not a company keeper’. He always lodged alone in the attic of someone’s house in London, not suitable quarters into which to invite guests. He never socialized at large or small gatherings, he did not attend any stages, he was not a member of the Mermaid’s club where his ‘peers’ exchanged conversation, nor was he even a visitor to the meetings at Ralegh’s house.

Why, then, was the name of ‘William Shakespeare’ chosen if that was not the Author’s name.? Looking back from any future century, reasons could be given that ‘William of Stratford’ was the same age as their author, it being assumed that he would live as long as the real author, he was at a mature age that was again reasonable to expect a mature product from a man of his age. He was not a Londoner where, otherwise, there would have been relatives or long time neighbours and friends who would know intimate details of his life and, particularly, that he was not a writer or probably that he could write only his name. He was also without a family in London and did not own property or a house in London where people could gather to see the Great ThisPoet.would seem a reasonable supposition but only from the perspective of a later century as at that time, the later discovered William Shaxper of Stratford was completely unknown as being suspected and later fully believed of being the ‘Shake speare’ of the Folio Plays as only after the Revolution of Cromwell and after in 1660 did that supposition and belief begin, and not too fervently as no one ever signified that they deliberately visited Stratford to visit his tomb and no one, even from the theatre, ever visited this man after he was later supposed to have ‘retired’ either in 1606 or 1611.

This corner is where William Shaxper collected from his debtors upon the due date or the forward money rose to ‘ten in the hundred’ and not knowing that the phrase ‘Stock Market’ would remain the centre for guessing how the future prices of ‘oats, peas, beans and barley’ will grow.The

Suspecting a plot is constantly derided today. Some are accused of seeing a plot in everything, but plots were many and usual in the 17th century. Perfect plots like perfect crimes are said to be impossible, but they are perfect if they are never known to be plots. Those who scoff at an incident being a plot make it easier for the plot not to be known. ‘Successful’ plots can later be revealed to be plots. The Gunpowder Plot was discovered before the powder was ignited.Only a few years before Christopher Marlowe came into London, but while he was still in his early twenties, the supposed plots by and around Mary Queen of the Scots were unsettling to Elizabeth the Queen. Both cousins caused the deaths of many as did their forefather before them, King Henry VIII. Mary, the daughter of Henry’s sister was accused of plotting the death of her husband. Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, had Mary’s head for plotting against her only three months before Marlowe came to London. Henry and his offspring sent enemies and friends to the block. The great and the famed were tortured or executed or both during William’s lifetime, Essex, Ralegh, and the gentlemen of worth involved in the Gunpowder Plot. Many poets spent time in prison, Marlowe and Jonson and others, many accused of sedition, atheism or plotting but not William Shakespeare, he again is unique for not doing anything.

The is no evidence of him putting anything into writing, although he did much financing, no mention of letters written by him, always it is his business associates who were writing among themselves of him, not what he had written to them. If there were no letters, nothing could be positively attested to about anything. Early biographers knew no more about him than ‘he was born in Stratford’ printing only what someone else had already invented or they added new fantasies themselves, a ‘varied traveller to the continent’, ‘served in a law office’, ‘a school teacher in the country’, ‘poached deer’ in a non existent ‘park’, an ything to fill the early void.

The times were well practiced in the art of planning and executing a plot, plots and rumours of plots, truths blurred by fictions, Royal Princes being replaced by another, infants being switched in their cradles. Was Elizabeth the Queen a man? Fiction imitated fact and fact became fiction.

No one ever mentioned in letters that he saw William on the stage or anywhere in London. In all the letters known to be written by Stratford residents of the time or the man’s closest relatives and associates, there is no allusion to theatre or to literature and plays even from those who, themselves, wrote poetry or owned a considerable library.

wife, Anne, was not literate, nor his daughter, Judith, but his other daughter, Susanne, could read. William’s biographers say that having a wife who could not read was ‘normal for the times’ as women simply did not need to know how to read or write. The wives of Richard Burbadge and Ned Alleyne were literate and were written to when their actor husbands were on tour. It does not seem normal that a ‘great poet’ would not teach his wife or daughter to read even if he were not ‘at one time a schoolmaster in the country’. His literate daughter married a physician.

Since he carried on the same ‘business’ in London as he is known to have done at Stratford, he lent monies at ‘six in the hundred’ at the corer of the ‘stocks’ market. The Stratford man became more prosperous for his dealings, buying but never selling property including the big House on High street near the church and land that he leased out to others. His neighbours in Stratford sought loans from him that are documented and so it would be reasonable for him to lend monies in larger London. William of Stratford ended with more money in goods and property than any actor or playwright could possibly accrue and his properties are listed in his last and only Williamwill.Shaxper’s

While they are on the subject of the effects of the plague, most biographers place great emphasis upon how the plague of 1593 affected the business of the theatre companies that were prohibited from playing ‘in London’ where they would have drawn large numbers of people closely packed together on the benches in confined areas. Here lascivious cads and bounders would jostle their way into positions where they would casually be forced to rub their shoulders or elbows against the buxom maidens who happened to be next to them pressed as they were along the crowded benches. Biographers leave unsaid that the companies were allowed to play in the country towns untouched by the plague, but the Curtain and the Theatre were outside the boundary walls of the City of London and should have been as free from London city edicts as was the nearest village. The theatre companies could travel the country roads at any time which the biographers say they did for ‘the eighteen months of the plague’.

Great legends of one human replacing or taking the identity of another: ‘The Man in the Iron Mask’, ‘The Count of Monte Cristo, ‘Les Miserables’, ‘The Tale of Two Cities’, ‘The Prisoner of Zenda’, ‘The Prince and the Pauper’, ‘Fingersmith’. The disappearance of one, the replacement by another; many are the books and plays that have dealt with this and false or mistaken identities. How many real people were falsely accused while putting their lives at peril, and their lives told as stories, Dr Peter Blood in ‘Captain Blood’, Dr Samuel Mudd in ‘Prisoner of Shark Island’ and one notable other, the Author of the Collector’s First Folio o f1623

There is no evidence that the name, ‘Shakespeare’, was ever seen in print until the fall of 1593 when it was listed in the Register for printing a work before it appeared on a printed poem, but once again much pains taking research is poured into investigating any aspects of William’s supposed life in London as if there were no one else on the London scene at the time. So many actions are ascribed to him simply because he was considered to be living at the time. The navy left port to encounter the Armada. ‘No doubt, he saw them leave.’ ‘No doubt he attended this noble’s wedding, that Royal Ball.’ With far more justification, they could explore the effect of the plague on the careers of the dramatist, Robert Greene, or Richard Field, as the plague spared them too. Greene was three years old in 1564 in Norwich, when it was second only to London in trade; he was spared to attend Oxford and Cambridge, to write drama and prose, to know an ‘upstart crow’ when he saw one, and to die in 1592 of sickness and poverty just before the plague came to London that Autumn.

Richard Field, a contemporary of Shaxper at Free School, who, the biographers insist came in close contact with ‘printing something of William’, was almost two years old when the plague carried of a quarter of his town of Stratford’s people, but spared him, too, along with three quarters of the town. He did not go to a university but to London where he was spared by every other visit of the plague just as ‘William’ was ‘spared’. Field had no ‘enforced leisure’, however, but continued to work at his print shop, that he owned, turning out valued books on important subjects until he became Master of the Stationers’ Company in 1619 long after William “had a merry meeting, and, it seems, drank too hard”, and “died of a fever there contracted” as author Anthony Burgess imagined

In an account in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., written for the National Geographic, February, 1987, (Vol. 171, No 2, P. 256), it states that “Professor J. Leeds Barroll of the University of Maryland, working with the Tudor and Stuart proclamations, state papers, correspondence, chronicles, broadsides, and bills of mortality in the Folger Library, is exploring the effect of the bubonic plague on Shakespeare’s career. It carried off a quarter of Stratford’s people in his birth year of 1564, but spared him. When the plague closed London’s theatres for 18 months in 1592 to 1594, his enforced leisure bore fruit in two long narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece”.

These biographers, to establish a very early activity in London for their William, while claiming that he was an actor, do not let him travel with the company, but they switch to his being a playwright where they excuse his not writing plays by saying that the ‘closing of the theatres’ caused “his enforced leisure” that “bore fruit’ or that “he took the opportunity of the closed theatres’ to write ‘Venus and Adonis’ for which he was paid not a tupence.

Four consecutive paragraphs in the National Geographic article are typical in their content concerning historians and the First Folio but lacking in even passable reporting. The first paragraph ends with the statement about William that during the 1592 1594 plague “his enforced leisure bore fruit in his two long narrative poems…” This is a most misleading assumption. The two poems were not written to make use of idle time but to follow an established procedure in order to attract a patron to supply money to support him, a man who is later claimed to have been employed in numerous occupations and fully so for the past four or five years. Patrons usually sponsored full time poets of verse. A.L. Rowse quotes E.K. Chambers’ first volume of ‘William Shakespeare’ that makes the same assumption about two poems and is probably the source for the other biographers but these statements mislead for they leave the impression that William is just starting out as a poet and in the Dedication this author claims that ‘Venus’ is ‘the first’ work of his ‘invention’. Only after 1623 and well into the 17th and 18th centuries, does the pendulum swing to the other extreme when biographers pick up the historians’ claim that during the 26 months from January 1592 to February 1594, this same beseecher for shillings from a wealthy young scoundrel, wrote five plays as well of the two long poems and many of the sonnets. To write within 26 months, ‘Titus’, ‘Errors’, ‘Verona’, ‘Shrew’ and ‘Richard III’, ‘many of the sonnets’ as well as ‘Venus’ and ‘Lucrece’, would have been a staggering accomplishment for a writer in the middle of his career, but for someone, not having finished ‘free school ’and with no experience in writing anything, to begin at the age of “27” and to write Richard III alone would be astounding.

Not even Greene says that the ‘upstart crow’ was William as that is the biographers’ desperate deduction to find a reference to him as anything, actor or sweep up man, before 1593. Greene said, an “upstart Crow beautified by our feathers” “is in his owne conceit the only Shake scene in a countrie”, but what does ‘Shake scene’ mean ? Does every time a writer mentions ‘shake’ mystically refer to the unheard of genius ? Capitalized words were not necessarily ‘names’ as all nouns were capitalized. It could be a clever Greene play-on-words, as a ‘Sceneshaker’ is a metaphor as Actors do not ‘shake the Scenery’ just as no actor ever ‘chewed Scenery’ or ‘brought the House down’.

The only reason given by biographers why a theatre company would ‘sell’ one of their valued plays to a printer, and thereby place it ‘into the public domain’ was to raise much needed money in times of plague when ‘the theatres were closed in London’ implying again that there was no money coming into their coffers ignoring that they would travel to country towns. Companies even played at Court when Court was held well out of town where it remained during the plague, at Hampton Court that Henry VIII confiscated from Cardinal Wolsey. Biographers claim that the plague was the only reason that the companies would sell plays. During the years 1597 1598, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men sold four plays to the publishers, ‘Loues Labore Lost’, ‘Richard II’, ’Richard III’, and ‘2 Henry IV’. The last three did not bear the name ‘W.S.’ These were not plague years and so the theatres were not ‘closed’. While the company players were ‘The Lord Strange’s Men, they were asked to desist from playing by Council but they “in a very Contemptuous manner went the Crosse Keys and played that afternoon” so says Lord Burlegh at the end of 1589. No plays were sold during the 18 plague months of 1592-1594.

The writer of this article repeats the illusion that two of the players were his ‘long time colleagues’ and he spells the first as ‘Heminge’ as it appears in the Folio of 1632 not that of 1623 as he states it. He also reveals that he is unaware that Heminges spelled his name with an ‘s’ and, like so many others, he copies the incorrect spelling in the 1632 Folio while sitting in the Folger Shakespeare Library. The Folger contains, as would be expected, many original documents and at least copies of almost all information on ‘Shakespeare’ but the writer continues to repeat the same errors that biographers have well established but that reading would eradicate, yet there is not a hint of how the examination of 8000 books by printers, that ‘motley crew’ of 60 more busy type setters, will be ‘better equipped to learn what Shakespeare intended’. The question is there but rightful curiosity is left suspended as not one example is given. The rest of this paragraph has nothing to do with its introductory sentence but says, ‘Actually, he published none of his plays’. At least this admission is correct but like so many accounts, it seems necessary for him to give a reason why he never published. Here is yet another, ‘Playwrights wrote for the ear, not the eye’. This is totally contrary to the intent of playwrights, Ben Jonson and Marlowe, who both re wrote their own ear plays for their publications of eye plays. Biographers write of William as if he lived in a vacuum resulting in a William who is unique as he does everything that no one else does or would do.

“‘Shakespeare intended ? Weren’t his sacred words cast in tablets of jade ? Actually, he published none of his plays. Playwrights wrote for the ear, not the eye; the occasion rather than eternity. During Shakespeare’s ‘life’ 18 of his plays appeared singly in quarto editions, ‘probably pirated’. Seven years after his death two long time colleagues, ‘John Heminge’ and Henry Condell, gathered and ‘Cured’ his works in the famous First and Second Folios. Half of his plays appeared here in print for the first time.”

He is also credited with composing the three Henry VI plays previously to this, sometime in 1691 and much of this is considered by the historians to have been also written in 1592. ‘Lucrece’, whoever wrote it, was in Richard Field’s print shop before May 9th, 1594 when it was finallyInpublished.addition(can it be forgotten ?) all during those 26 months William is pictured as acting, rehearsing in the mornings, performing in the afternoon, as all remember, the full time career as owner and general manager from which he had months of ‘leisure time’.

The remaining three paragraphs of the National Geographic article state: “A discreet chuckle in the [Folger] reading room, silence drew my attention to Peter Blayney. ‘Look’, he pointed to an inverted ornament, ‘They don’t care’. Peter refers to Elizabethan printers in the present tense. He knows some 60 so well, a motley crew. ‘We printers’, lamented one, ‘are called upon to publish so much news of everything that ‘Marvale it is, how that our wittes can last’. Even so, this 1591 printing by John Wolfe of Bertrand de Logue’s Discourses of Warre and Single Combat was a bit much. Of 22 ornaments in its 76 pages, three were upside down including Wolfe’s own trademark.”

“At Cambridge University, Peter began a minute analysis of the first edition of one play, King Lear. His new research, which may take ten years, includes the printers of eighteen Shakespearean plays. ‘All but one of the quartos were first printed between1593 and 1609’, he told me; ‘I’m examining 8000 books, nearly half of them in the Folger. When I finish, scholars will be better equipped to learn what Shakespeare intended’.”

11 Hesketh Pearson in his book P.191 says of the Folio, “The Editors were Heminge and Condell, who in the ‘Epistles’ to the Readers implied that the poet had been preparing his works for the press: ‘It had been a thing, we confess worthy to have been wished, that the Author himself had lived to have set forth and overseen his own writings’”. There is nothing in this to ‘imply’ that William had any intention of publishing anything nor is there any other ‘evidence’ that he planned any publishing. These two ‘writers’, (whom Pearson calls ‘Heminge and Condell’ indicating that he, too, refers only to the ‘Epistles’ and has done no research to know that Heminges did not spell his name without an ‘s’), are saying only that they wished that he had published them himself. Condell and Heminges are revered for their printing of the plays but they would be no more qualified or knowledgeable than any other actors to publish plays, yet all of the biographers do not admit that whoever wrote this ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ included their names as they were the only two players still alive beyond 1623 other than Cuthbert Burbadge and one other actor who were possibly forgotten by the time that this was published in 1632.

The biographers still believe the words of these two actors when they say “we pray you do not envy his friends the office of their care, and pain, to have collected and published them, and so to have published them” without asking why William waited so long and why they waited so long, where they obtained them and where they stored them for over 30 years ? These two actors also imply that up to that time the public “were abused with divers stolen and surreptitious copies maimed and deformed” and that those now presented by them in the Folio were “absolute in the numbers, as he conceived them” and needed no amending. Pearson should know then that the actors could not have been ‘editors’ of the plays if they were the pristine plays as William conceived them. Pearson shows no evidence of his knowing the names of the three publishers who brought the plays to the Jaggard brothers. ‘William Shakespeare’ never published any of the plays nor did he publish the ‘Sonnets’ and it is known that John Harrison was the publisher of ‘Lucrece’ and that the printer, Field, handed over to Harrison the publication of ‘Venus’. Why was Harrison, or anyone else, involved in the publishing of the two poems when they are supposed to be William’s own private submissions to a possible patron for his own personal income if the man, Wriothesley, accepted him. Several other poets had already published a work and dedicated it in the usual manner to the same Wriothesley but to no avail and ‘William’ was not accepted.

No one has ever alluded to seeing any writings, play copies, books or papers at William’s house at Stratford. No one had acknowledged in writing or word of mouth to anyone who recorded the words that they knew that William of Stratford was a poet or playwright. In 1623, almost anyone up to the age of 35 would not know who or what ‘William Shakespeare’ was, unlike today with books, newspapers, photographs and television constantly reminding the public of past persons of renown. There was nothing in the city of London during the spring of 1623 to tell anyone who was ‘William’ or ‘Wullm or ‘Wllm’ or ‘W. Shakespeare’. The name had appeared during the previous 30 years on a single page near the front in each of 17 thin Quartos all containing no printed engraving of the author, nor did they contain any information about the man to identify who he was or what he had done or what he had written previously, play or poem. There was no ‘author of’ credit or jacket blurb, on the name in various forms and abbreviations of the name. The printing of his name in the John Fletcher play, ‘Two Noble Kinsmen’ was not published until 1634 where he was credited as co author. Until the ‘Droeshout engraving’ displayed in the 1623 Folio, no one had ever seen the face of a man accompanied by the name. No one upon seeing the Droeshout in the Folio ever said that they had seen anyone with the same likeness or name on a London street

The company that produced several of the Plays was under the guidance of James Burbadge whose experience went back to the company under the patronage of the ‘Earl of Leicester’, long a favourite of the Queen, and a noble who more than anyone else in the period encouraged actors and brought theatre into a respectable new art for England. He was patron of English drama and thereby the begetter of English dramatic literature. James’ two sons were Cuthbert and Richard. Cuthbert had been a partner with James in the management of the Theatre while Richard was their younger leading actor, as powerful at performing, possibly, as Ned Alleyne but his style of acting differed Young Richard was showing even greater promise.

The three men who carried the thirty odd Plays to the Jaggard brothers could not have been collecting the ‘original’ of each Play from the time each was written. It could not be their choice that from the beginning each Play eventually chosen for the Folio would be produced on stage by a company of players other than the players who produced Marlowe’s plays with any such purpose as to minimize any similarity between the way Marlowe’s plays were interpreted particularly by the style of the leading actor, Ned Alleyne, who was so successful and popular in his portrayal of Tamburlane and Dr Faustus. Ned’s manner of acting placed his own stamp upon these roles and with the public clamouring for more bombast and thundering verse identified him with these roles.

The Company had a long experienced roster of actors who had an impressive total number of years upon the stage with this and previous companies and there were enough of them to fill the many roles needed for historical enactments that the Collectors understood that their Author had contemplated a series on English monarchs that he had already partly written. By the nature of their subjects, these plays would contrast with the bombastic plays he had based upon foreign heroes. He would bring to the open stage under the nose of Elizabeth the Queen the truth about the throne and those of her forebears who had taken turns at occupying that throne by hook or by crook, the Author having in mind those who had reached for that crown by either method and to put off any suspicious Officer of the State, scenes of wry and cutting comedy would be slyly interspersed.Itisknown from a written description of an early production of ‘Macbeth’ that the play had a great dissimilarity to the Folio version.

The first publication witnessed with the name ‘Shakespere’ was the Quarto of ‘Loues labore lost’ dated 1598 or five years after Marlowe. It is claimed to have been written in 1594 but this was the first time that anyone had seen or heard a mention or heard of the word ‘Shakespere’ as the name was spelled on the Quarto. The full title page read: “A PLEASANT Conceited Comedie CALLED Loues labore lost. As it was presented before her Highnes this last Christmas. Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere. Imprinted at London by W.W. for Cutbert Burby, 1598”.

The Quarto did not claim that the play was written by ‘Shakespere’ but that it was corrected from an earlier play and then augmented or added to by ‘W. Shakespere’ without giving the first name. The publisher is ‘Cutbert Burby’ whom some biographers consider was the proper name for the man but it is obviously an alternate spelling or, more likely, a mistaken spelling for Cuthbert Burbadge, the original spelling. Cuthbert was the manager and co owner of the Burbadge acting company.

The Burbadge Company had comparative stability. It had survived the long period of the plague and the company’s future looked secure with the co-operative brothers to take over the compan y should old James retire. James, as expected would bequeath it as a rich legacy unto his issue. Cuthbert would continue to manage the finances while Richard would mature into an even finer actor and manager the theatrical staging.

‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ 1612 ‘by W. Shakespeare’ expanded edition) ‘Venus and Adonis’ 1593 (name at bottom of ‘Dedication’) All spelling as it appeared. An illustrated ‘Culture of England’, printed in London in 1967, has several statements that are false. Referring to the play, ‘The Tempest’, “It is the most perfect of his plays, and this may be why his friends, Heminge and Condell, although they knew it to be his last, placed it first in the collected edition of the Folio, published in 1623, seven years after his death”. No one knows when the Author died as there is no document in the archives of London verifying the birth, marriage or death of anyone named ‘Shakespeare’ in any spelling to be found in the official records of London. The writer of this article is merely accepting the mistaken belief that the Author was the person whose records of birth, marriage and death were found in the Stratford records in the mid 1800’s. As there are no documents or letters to say that ‘he’ was an actor, there are none to say that either actor was his ‘friend’ as this information was printed over the names of the two actors and printed in the Folio of 1632 when the two men were no longer living. All biographers of the 20th century should know that Heminges spelled his name with an ‘s’, as those in the year 1600 would know. Why it appears without an ‘s’ in that Folio is a mystery. No official ‘birth, marriage and death’ document in the London archives of the time exists of a man named ‘Shakespeare’ in any spelling, nor in the written word of any writer of London of the time to verify that anyone of the time ‘knew’ or had seen a man by that name or had ever heard of a man in Stratford called William Shaxper in any spelling.

‘Excellent history of the Merchant of Venice’ 1600 ‘Written by W. Shakespeare’

‘The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet’ 1604 ‘By William Shakespeare’

‘Loues Labore Lost’ 1598 ‘Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespeare’

‘Troilus and Cressida’ 1609 (name in much small print) ‘Sir John Oldcastle’ 1660 (name on 1st edition only)

‘Jaggard’s Collection of Plays’ 1619 (name as author on all plays)

PUBLISHED PLAYS ON THE TITLE PAGE

‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ 1599 ‘by W. Shakespeare’

‘The Tragedie of King Richard II’ 1598 ‘by William Shakespeare’ ‘A midsummer nights dream’ -1600- ‘Written by William Shakespeare’

‘Mr William Shak speare: His true Chronical Histories of the life and Death of King Lear and his three daughters’ -1608‘Pericles’ 1609 (name in usual place)

‘Shake speares Sonnets 1609 ‘never before imprinted’

Plays were purchased outright from the authors by the owners of the acting companies who held the complete rights to publish plays or not, and the theatre owners rarely published plays and so the playwrights could not publish their plays having sold them. Christopher Marlowe had Edward Blount as publisher and Blount’s name appears on the First Folio in 1623 as “Printed by Isaac Jaggard and Ed. Blount” but incorrectly as only Jaggard was the printer and Blount was the publisher along with William Apsley and John Smethwick, the three “Collectors’, who had possession of the thirty six Plays that they took to Jaggard, who was the Printer.

The second possible reason is that in coming to their attention the 429 word poem was mentioned in the New York Times Book Review as being claimed by a Shakespeare scholar as a new found poem by Shakespeare because “several words in the poem don't appear previously in Shakespear” and that was the evidence that he wrote it

Two statisticians, one from the University of Chicago and the other from Stanford, published a paper in which they proposed to determine how many words ‘Shakespeare’ knew but never used. Their method entailed counting how many words had been used once, twice and so on, and by this, they calculated the number he knew but still had yet to use. If a new found poem appeared, they would be able to determine if it were by the same author by estimating how many new words it would contain, those never used elsewhere before and how many words it would contain that had been used only twice and more.

OUT DAMNED COMPUTER! Robert J. Meyer.

Granting that testing Elizabethan poems of known authorship would reveal nine 'new' words in each and every poem, would that not indicate the futility in predicting how many words any author ‘knew’ as the experiment would therefore indicate if not prove that there would always be ‘new’ words to be found as one author could never compose sufficient 500 word poems to exhaust the words that he ‘knew but never used’ ? How many such poems would be further required to drain a fixed supply of 1500 new words at seven or eight new words each ? Gentlemen, start your computer engines. Why would two university statisticians believe that any author had a fixed number of words that he ‘knew’ but had not yet used ? The supreme oddity in such a proposal lies in the word ‘know’, that a writer relies upon a supply of words that he ‘knows’, words kept in the memory that can be recalled and defined rather than upon a vast supply or words available though reading whatever material, printed or otherwise, including a dictionary, to which the writer may have access, some words used if needed but the majority of thousands of words never finding appropriate use.

Why would two mathematicians not realize that any writer uses words read from literature and not from some innate memory ? The first possible reason is that they are mathematicians and so the challenge of mathematically solving the puzzle so fascinates them that they choose not to allow the rational questioning of logic of a fixed vocabulary to prevail in their path.

The quill quickly scratches through the old word ‘villain’ without a blot upon the paper to pen “O thou treacherous, lecherous, bawdy megalomaniac” !

Before testing a 429 word poem of unknown authorship that was found at Oxford's Bodelean Library, they predicted that if this poem were written by the author of Hamlet, it would contain seven words that the author had never used in any of his other works, an average of approximately one in every sixty words. The poem contains not only nine 'new words' but also the predicted number of words that the author had used once, those used twice, on up to words used 99 times. They were surprised at the results. The poem confirmed their predictions exactly.

To be fair in their experiment, the mathematicians would have had to test their theory on several Elizabethan poems of known authorship, at least one of Spenser’s, one of Sidney’s, before testing a poem of unknown authorship. Would it not appear obvious to them even without testing that they would find a similar number of 'new' and used words in the same ratio if they had tested a work of any Elizabethan poet and that their predicted findings would not confirm that ‘S’’ wrote an Edward Spenser poem?

When subjected to other tests, this poem failed to be a poem by ‘S’ which may indicate that rather than being a coincidence in the similar numbers in the use of words, it is almost mandatory.Asimilar attempt has been made to find whether the Book of Mormon was written by Joseph Smith in the nineteenth century or whether it was an ancient writing. Comparing Smith's confirmed prose with the Book of Mormon showed patterns not common, but the Book contains entire word-for-word blocks of the King James Version of the Old Testament along with excerpts and quotations, at least twenty in all, sprinkled throughout, along with excerpts from the New Testament that refer to the Old Era. The wording is then a 'translation' into several uses of English including the Jacobean.

A computer counting comparison of the Folio Plays with confirmed prose of a 'William Shake speare' is not possible as there is no prose or any writing existing that is known to be written by William of Stratford nor by ‘S’. There can be only comparisons made between works that are claimed to be by ‘S’ but these do not reveal the identity of that author.

The infusion from another book, if recognized at the time, would have rendered the word comparison experiments futile. If it were not recognized, it would indicate that the team of word counters were unfamiliar with the material and that any conclusion would be invalid as such versions from mixed sources would challenge computer word comparisons that rely upon the numbers of uses of words. Authors in the same era may use the majority of words in common and use them in a similar frequency, but perhaps not in the same configuration. They may use a word often in a particular space or may shy from repeating it in the same paragraph or page.

Both the mathematicians and the scholar are then caught up in the foremost idolatry legend, that what applies to ‘S’ applies to no one else Without first finding whether the proposed theory applied equally to any one else of the period, the theory was applied to this one poem and found to be successful, therefore the theory proved that ‘S’ wrote the poem. The poem didn't sound like ‘S’, didn't look like ‘S’ but it contained words ‘S’’ never used. That surely would indicate that ‘S’ wrote it. This may not seem scientific, mathematical or logical but ‘S’ is unique, nothing that applied to him ever applied to anyone else. So the possibility that the 'new words' theory could apply to almost any other Elizabethan poem did not seem to occur to the mathematicians. The beatification of ‘S’ charms all, even the logic of mathematicians. This may indicate a third reason that mathematician-statisticians are specialists who not only of necessity may narrow their field of interests but in their experience of finding so much that mathematics can 'prove' are convinced that mathematics is a ‘science’ which it is not.

In still another experiment, 52 commonly used simple words were examined to see how they were used by thirty writers compared to their use in the Folio Plays. By comparison, the conductors of the experiment ruled out almost everyone as being the author of the Plays, everyone including Marlowe and Bacon, everyone except Queen Elizabeth I until 'further tests' were made that eliminated her. In this ‘apple to oranges’ comparison, words of four letters were found to be used more than in the works of later writers, but who of the Elizabethan writers did not use ‘thou’, ‘dost’ and 'hast' that diminished during the Restoration.

There is a similarity to the Book of Mormon comparison, however, in that the First Folio contains word-for-word excerpts from the histories and other books of the time that have the writing patterns of Holinshed and the English translation of Plutarch from whence they came and not the pattern of any other Elizabethan writer. The early Henry plays are rewritings with countable changes from the oft produced plays written much earlier. The 'styles' of these versions are so similar that scholars over the centuries since have agreed and disagreed on who wrote what and who copied from whom.

From this, it was concluded that these roles that introduced a high number of the ‘rare’ words but used randomly in the later play were the roles played by the author himself and that could only be ‘Shake speare’.

‘The Tempest’, for example, is dated at 1611 since it was believed that this play was inspired by the 1609 shipwreck off Bermuda of would be settlers on that North Atlantic island. However, this is based entirely upon one line in the play: 'From the still vexed Bermoothes, there she’s hid’, another example of the nineteenth century's scant knowledge of Elizabethan Jacobean times. So positive were some editors of this supposition that the word Bermuda was substituted in several printings with no explanation cited.

Why did the author use these rare words again in a later play ? Because he had them “foremost in his mind” having memorized and repeated them so many times upon the stage ! Why, then, would it be concluded that it was William who acted these roles ? Because he being the author used these words again in a later play, but why would he use them again ? The reasoning goes around again in this circle of argument that is rooted in the belief that the author of the Plays not only was William of Stratford but was also an actor of his own plays. There is no mention anywhere of William of Stratford or anyone by the name of William Shake speare as an actor before or since 1616, the year that William of Stratford died. A complete search of all plays performed at court in his lifetime never revealed the name among all the actors. The well known or oft-repeated example of a payment to William Shake-spear for a court performance during a Christmas period was actually written many years later, after 1616, to balance the books. The only listing of the name in a book is at the top of those called the comoedians who had taken part in two plays of Ben Jonson in his compiled works of Jonson published in 1616 after the death of William and this makes no mention of the parts any of the comoedians played. There is no confirmation of this during William's lifetime. There is no basis to imply that William was an actor and none to imply that the author of the Plays was an actor. No one knows the order in which the 36 Plays were written as they were given the generally accepted order by one or two 19th century scholars based on supposed internal reference that the scholars reasoned could not have been included before a certain date when there occurred an event to which, they supposed, the line referred.

The 1976 book, ‘A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English’, identifies ‘Bermoothes’ as a London district adjacent to Drury Lane, where those who wished to hide themselves could find anonymity and so ‘there she's hid’. Here is a new word that the writer never used before for the uncomplicated reason that there was no dramatic context to use it before.According to the theory of word collecting in a single role, which indicated the author’s role, is the role of the first character to come on stage and speak, the Chorus in Henry V is one such ‘Author's role’. This role consists mainly of five of the longest soliloquies in the Plays. They are expository, almost commentary, they are not confined to a character's personality.

Then the supreme theory was formed. Rarely used words, not unusual words but those used ten times or less in the entire works were long known to be found clustered chronologically in the Folio Plays, that is, if a number of these ‘rare’ words were used in two plays, they were spread out among the dialogue of several characters in the latter play whereas in the earlier play they were found mostly in a single character role.

The experimenters discovered that the Folio Plays, compared to the poems of others, used the present tense more. Quite a revelation !

By this same finding, three other roles contain rare words, those used no more than ten times in all the works, they are those of Bedford, Suffolk and Warwick in the 'first' three plays ascribed to this author but which have the greatest controversy as to who wrote them, Henry VI parts I, II and III. These plays go back in ‘dating’ to 1590 to 1592 and even further back if the same author wrote the plays from which these three are taken. Is the 'author' to have acted these roles as well in 1587 ? William of Stratford was 23 at that time and probably could not speak the English written in these plays. Stratford colloquial at that time was indecipherable as evidenced from examples known.

The role of Chorus in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ consists entirely of two eight line prologues but again they are expository. The phrase words, ‘star crossed’ and ‘death marked’’ appear in the first prologue but it would be difficult to guess which other 'rare' words are included in this brief role or why any would be particularly at the top of the author's pen to use again in a later play.

The words ‘household’, ‘mutiny’ and ‘traffic’, also included, would not, of course, find justification as often as ‘tender’, ‘desire’ and ‘affection’, all words used in these prologues.

Scholars usually assume that plays are written in sequence from beginning to end and not in any other order. Never do they suppose that end portions or a work may have been completed long before earlier passages. They also assume that one play is written in its entirety before another play is begun, never that the author may have two or more plays in progress, setting aside an earlier almost completed play before completing a later composed second or a third partially completed play. Yet they must realize that artists and music composers as well as other writers have done this consistently. Never is it taken that a play may be completely rewritten before being produced or after it has been staged. Still all manner of traits is observed in the arbitrarily prescribed chronology of the actual writing process as if anyone knew what that was.

The presented 'proof' that William had acted in these opening roles lies in that the writer used these rare words again in later plays, and the reason forwarded why he did so is that he had memorized and recited them so often on stage implanting them so firmly into his vocabulary that they were at the tip of his pen ready to be used again, but by definition they were used less than ten times in all his works and these words, then, did not tumble out of his play acting memory time and time again.

The other role is the Ghost in Hamlet and although a larger role, the Ghost is not the first to enter and speak although ‘Adam’ and the ‘Ghost’ are two of these rare word containing roles. According to the finding comparing rare words used in Hamlet with those strewn in Macbeth ‘written a few years after’, and with those in King Lear ‘also written a few years later’, the Ghost in Hamlet is the writer's role, but the chronology of which play was written before another is arbitrary and based mainly upon when the Plays are believed to have been first produced plus internal causes for dating as in ‘Tempest’ wherein is ‘Bermoothes’, this must be Bermuda, the site of not the one supposed but of countless wrecks.

Only two roles have been mentioned for William, both coming only from 18th century legends. They are Adam in ‘As You Like It’ who is not the first character to enter and speak and has only one line in the first scene and does not appear again until the second scene of Act II.

The long soliloquies of the Chorus in Henry V could have been the last to be written or rewritten. They are some of the most coveted elocutions in the entire body of work along with the lengthy orations in the title role of Hamlet, Richard III and Henry V. The only logical casting for the role of Chorus in Laurence Olivier’s motion picture version of Henry V was John Gielgud, the one master who could by his voice alone conjure the printed word into vivid imagery. However, Gielgud didn’t receive the offer of the role as his delivery of the poetic lines would have left an unmatchable pinnacle for the one in the role of Henry to scale.

The next intriguing aspect is that this author acted in most if not all of his plays, in Richard II, he was to have played, according to rare word use, both John of Gaunt and the gardener. He should have doubled in Hamlet as the gravedigger who utters some quite rare words. If the author acted in the plays, he has more than doubled the amount of time needed to accomplish all that has been credited to him. All such work attribution vastly under estimates the hours that are necessary to memorize lines, attend rehearsals, act in the plays day after day while writing these particular plays, 36 is it in the Folio ? Or is it only 35 ?

The author of the Folio Plays is estimated to have had a vocabulary several times that of lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson two centuries later, yet after penning complex play after play he seemingly must depend upon his actor’s memory of a Danish Ghost’s recitation for words to pepper the dialogue in later plays about Romans and Greeks.

Coward and Novello did not write lengthy historical plays in pentameter. Their frothy but fascinating banter did not require 300 or so rare source books and they had, if they should ever need them, the availability of the latest lexicons, thesauruses and dictionaries, all unknown in English in 1600.

If this unconscious tendency remained in the writer of the Plays, would this not apply also to any author actor ? Not everyone can name several author actors, those who were fairly prolific but acted in their own plays, memorizing and repeating the words they have already written and possibly rewritten as well as those words or lines read over many times then scratched through and discarded. Beside ‘how many words did he know but never used ?’ is the question of ‘how many did he use and then blot them out never to use again’

The rare words were chosen from those in the entire works, therefore the words used by Bedford in Henry VI, Part I had 35 additional plays in which they could be used again, the rare words in King Lear had only a few remaining, yet Lear's rare words were used about as often as any other of the rare words.

The most intriguing feature of this concept is that it denigrates the author of the plays. Only because he memorized and repeated the lines on stage is he able or compelled to use these common words again as if he would not otherwise use the best word to fit the occasion. Another premise forwarded by the word counters is that the author after writing Hamlet, the rare words in the Ghost's role took greater precedence in subsequent plays and then drifted off in others only to find renewed use in subsequent plays after the Hamlet play was put back into production and the author had to learn his ghostly lines again.

Few would bring to mind the name of Colly Cibber (c 1700) who rewrote Richard III adding pages of his own words in his inimitable style so popular with playgoers for 150 years. He acted in these his own plays and so it would be interesting to know if he repeated his own rare words in future plays.

The rarest words he bothered to use were the original lines from the Folio. The playgoers loved his creations and rejected any substituted original. In the 20th century, how many actors of their own plays can be named ? The foremost remembered is Noel Coward. He can be considered quite prolific in his stage plays, particularly when many contained his original songs and lyrics. The other remembered writer is his rival on the London stage, Ivor Novello. Both wrote dramas and musical plays, composed the dialogue, music and lyrics and acted the leading roles many times. Not until such a theory had proved valid for Coward, Novello and Colley Cibber could attention be paid to it.

To determine whether Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon, an entire team of researchers working with a computer took 10,000 hours to produce a single essay on the subject. Yet biographers are confident that Wizard William directed and acted every afternoon in plays that he dashed off in the evening by candlelight in his garret over the wig maker’s shop on Silver Street at Mugle.

The mandatory requirement is to have books to read and to use as references, so much so that the actual process of writing plays would be one fifth writing and four fifths reading, and that four fold reading time impresses far more words rare or common to the memory than any boring task of rote recital.

The biographers and scientists who write about or analyze the Folio Plays consistently betray their lack of understanding either of the process of an actor in the rehearsal and run of a play or of the requirements to research and write a complex play.

How would the Elizabethan writer amass sufficient vocabularies without benefit of dictionaries in English ? The earliest dictionaries gave meanings in Latin and so a thorough knowledge of Latin was a requisite for expanding a usable vocabulary by that means, but to use a large vocabulary in writing does not signify that the writer had a large vocabulary in his memory.

Fortunately, that man did. He was Samuel Pepys, born in London but in 1633 and so he was completely innocent of English Theatre as all of England’s dramatists of the era were gone by 1640 and there was no encouragement for new dramatists to appear under the complete government banishment of Theatre.

“Oct 30, 1660. In the afternoon, to ease my mind, I went to the Cockpitt all alone and there saw a fine play called The Tamer tamed, very well acted.”

SAMUEL PEPYS GOES TO THE THEATRE Robert J. Meyer

“Nov 20, 1660. After dinner Mr Shepley and I to the new Playhouse near Lincolnes Inn fields (which was formerly Gibbons tennis court) where the play of Beggars’ bush was newly begun. It was well acted (and here I saw the first time one Moone, who is said to be the best actor in the world, lately come over with the King); and endeed it is the finest playhouse, I believe, that ever was in England.”

Samuel Pepys was the son of a tailor, educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, the University of Christopher Marlowe’s graduation, and he married at the age of 22 and the next year entered the household of his cousin Admiral Edward Montagu, another man fortunate of birth. In 1660, Pepys became Clerk of Acts to the Navy Board at 27 and twelve years later he was appointed Secretary to the Admiralty. Here was a cultivated young man in 1660 who was an avid buyer of books at the bookseller by the church door as he had a great interest in science, music and, again fortunately for posterity, the Theatre and he is the only author to express his educated opinion of the plays that were produced in London for the decade of his Diary, during which he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and later served as President. From his position at the ‘Navy’ and from his outside interests, he knew people at every level. Those mentioned in his Diary were merchants, tradesmen, artists and clerks as well as the Dukes, office holders, physicians and bishops. Pepys knew all of the actors and actresses, many personally, and it would seem that he had witnessed most of the plays that were presented at not one, but three theatres during his years, the 9½ recorded in his Diary to May 31st 1669 and in his remaining years until 1703. As was George Bernard Shaw, Pepys was a reader of books and plays as well as a playgoer and so his recorded opinions were minor theatre reviews. Yet, these statements were never included by the biographers of the 19th and 20th centuries in their books about ‘William’.

Only those who attended the newly opened theatre of Sir William Davenant and saw his acting company, The Duke of York’s Players, had the experience of the plays that were denied London since the closing of all theatres during the two civil wars and the Commonwealth under OliverFortunatelyCromwell., one man recorded in his diary his daily experiences from January 1st 1660, the year that Davenant opened his theatre. However, that diary was not printed until 1825, well into the Victorian era and then only a ‘small bowdlerized selection from his 54 notebooks’ came to print until 1875 79 when six volumes were published. This meant that the entire 18th century and three quarters of the 19th century could know nothing of the revival of Theatre in England, whether it was popular or what the playgoers thought about the playwrights of the Elizabethan era whose plays they had never seen or were aware of before. The late Victorian Age would still know nothing unless that one man had regularly attended the theatre.

‘Roxalana’ is Hester Davenport, actress with the Duke’s Company who was known by her role in Davenant’s ‘Siege of Rhodes’.

“May 20, 1662. My wife and I by coach to the Opera and there saw the second part of Seige of Rhodes but it is not so well done as when Roxalana was there who, it is said, is now owned by my Lord of Oxford.”

“April 20, 1661. To the Cockpitt; and there, by favour of one Mr Bowman, got in and saw The Humorsome Lieutenant acted before the King, but not very well done…But my pleasure was great to see the manner of it; and so many great beauties, but above all Mrs. Palmer, with whom the King doth discover a great deal of Familiarity.”

“May 8, 1663. Thence to the new playhouse, the second day of its being opened. The play was The Humorous Lieutenant, a play that hath little good in it.”

“July 2, 1661. After my singing master had done and took Coach and went to Sir Wm. Davenant’s opera this being the fourth day that it hath begun, and the first that I have seen it. Today was acted the second part of The Siege of Rhodes. The King being come, the Scene opened; which endeed is very fine and magnificent, and well acted, all but the Eunuche who was so much out that he was hissed off the stage.”

The Cockpit is situated about 300 yards from the Thames River, (then pronounced Thaimz} north of the King Street Gate and across from the Whitehall Palace. Until July of 1660, Pepys lived a block south of the Cockpit on Axe Yard.

“Aug 2, 1664. To the King’s playhouse and there saw Bartholomew fayre, which doth still please me and is, as it is acted, the best comedy in the world I believe.”

The time of Dr Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary is still far off and so the spelling of Pepys’ words reflects the pronunciation and the still variations of spelling in 1661.

“Here we hear that Clun, one of their best actors, was the last night, going out of towne (after he had acted The Alchymist, wherein was one of his best parts that he acts) to his country house, was set upon and murdered, one of the rogues taken, an Irish fellow. It seems, most cruelly butchered and bound, the house will have a great miss of him.”

“Sept 10, 1664. Then my wife and I and Mercer to the Dukes house and there saw The Rivals, which is no excellent play, but good action in it especially Gosnell comes and sings and dances finely, but for all that, fell out of the Key, so that the Musique could not play to her afterwards and so did Harris also go out of the tune to agree with her.”

Elizabeth Mercer is the companion of Pepys’ wife, Elizabeth St Michel. Winifred Gosnell was also a companion to Pepys’ wife before becoming an actress and a member of the ‘Duke’s Company’ of Davenant as was the actor, Henry Harris. ‘The Rivals’ is not the future play of Sheridan but an ‘adaptation’ or reworking by Davenant of the play, ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’ by John Fletcher that later is co attributed to a ‘William Shake speare’. Another favourite dramatist of Davenant, Ben Jonson, has five of his plays produced during the 1660s but not all by Davenant.“Dec18,

Elizabeth Knepp is an actress with the King’s Company. Pepys in his ‘review’ of Fletcher’s ‘The Custom of the Country’ writes similarly to G. Bernard Shaw but briefly.

1664. So home to dinner and then to my chamber to read Ben Johnsons Cateline, a very excellent piece.”

“Oct 1, 1665. Spent most of the morning reading of The Siege of Rhodes, which is certainly (the more I read it the more I think so) the best poem that ever was wrote.”

This is a play by Thomas Heywood. “Jan 11, 1668. To the King’s House, there to see The Wildgoose chase which I never saw but have long longed to see, it being a famous play, but as it was yesterday, I do find that where I expect most I find least satisfaction, for in this play I met with nothing extraordinary at all, but very dull inventions and designs.”

“Jan 2, 1667. Alone to the King’s House and there saw The Custome of the Country, the second time of its being acted, wherein Knipp does the Widow well but of all the plays that ever I did see, the worst, having neither plot, language, nor anything in the earth that is acceptable. Only Knipp sings a little song admirably. But fully the worst play that ever I saw or I believe shall see. So away home, much displeased for the loss of so much time.”

Sir William Davenant is very familiar with the plays of the Cambridge man, John Fletcher, who wrote after 1608 and Davenant produced twelve plays that Fletcher wrote without his usual co author, Francis Beaumont.

On the 31st of May following, Pepys gave up writing his Diary. “May 31, 1669. And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my journal, I being not able to do it any longer, having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time that I take a pen in my hand; and therefore, whatever comes of it I must forbear.”

This is the play of Davenant that they had seen on stage in 1661. For the plays of Jonson, all does not end well. “April 17, 1669. At noon home to dinner, and there find Mr Pierce the surgeon, and he dined with us; and there hearing that The Alchymist was acted, we did go and took him with us, at the King’s House; and is still a good play, it having not been acted for two or three years before, but I do miss Clun for the Doctor but more, my eyes will not let me enjoy the pleasure I used to have in a play.”

The ‘King’s Playhouse’ is situated on a short street between Bow Street on the west and Drury Lane on the east. A block south of Drury Lane another short street east past the Clare Market leads to Davenant’s ‘The Duke’s Playhouse’ by Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a block south of Holborn Street and Gray’s Inn. “Dec 19, 1668. My wife and I by hackney to the King’s playhouse and there, the pit being full, sat in a box above and saw Catelin’s Conspiracy yesterday being the first day a play of much good sense and words to read, but that doth appear the worst upon the stage, I mean the least divertising, that ever I saw any, though most fine in clothes and a fine Scene of the Senate and of a fight, that I ever saw in my life but the play is only to be read and so home, my wife to read to me out of The Siege of Rhodes.”

There were several printed references to the name of the writer of ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ but only two references ever linked the name on the poems with the name on the Quarto Plays. The one reference by Harvey could have been made on the assumption that the two names referred to the same person but Harvey gives no personal knowledge that he knew that they referred to the same person. The only other reference was by Francis Meres who in his huge volume listed several plays and poems as being by William but he was not writing from personal knowledge of any of the named authors and his listings included the names of dozens of English authors and hundreds of titles known up to that time of 1598, more books than Meres could possibly have personally fingered at his age of thirty years, much less have checked on for the authenticity that has since been questioned. He gives no information as to how he obtained these titles or what were his sources, but he was not claiming personal knowledge of the dozens of the now obscure authors that he named. He may have used bookseller’s lists. He could not have imagined that a single page of his 600 pages would be used two and a half centuries later as the ‘ultimate proof’ that the author was the Stratford William even though this does not establish a connection and proves nothing. He merely listed what was already known to be in print although some few of the titles that he listed are not known to have been printed by 1598.

While writer Halliwell was unearthing documented information in Stratford of a man called ‘William Shakespeare’ and Knight stayed in London conjuring up the life of the Shakespeare of the Plays that he desired to imagine, no one had yet found any evidence that anyone had ever acknowledged that the two Williams were the same person. Before 1623, there was no documented evidence that anyone who mentioned the name that was credited on the title pages of some well known plays as ‘by Wm Shakespeare’ recognized the name as being a member of ‘the Lord Chamberlain, his servaunts’, or that he knew for certain, or assumed, understood, took for granted or even surmised that the name was that of an actor with the company.

No written reference by the Stratford William’s personal friends or relatives ever has the slightest hint of their William being either a playwright or an actor. No actor or author, playwright or personal London friend of William ever gave written evidence that he was a writer of a poem or play, broadside or even a personal letter during the lifetime of the Stratford William. This includes Heminges and Condell ‘whose’ brief but well known statements were ‘written’ not only long after William’s death in 1616 but after the decision to print the Folio of 1623. Other than in the ‘Dedication’ notes to the Folio of 1632, neither Heminges nor Condell left any tribute or mention of William as a writer, nor did any other actors including Richard Burbadge. At the time of the First Folio, only Heminges, Condell and Richard Tooley, the actors, and Cuthbert Burbadge, the manager, were still living. The ‘Dedication’ and the ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ printed over the names, ‘Heminge and Condell’; in the 1632 Folio reveal more than a hint of the hand of Ben Jonson who was still living whereas Heminges and Condell were long deceased.

The only appearances of the name were either on the title pages of some of the Quartos or some editions of the two poems open to the public or to the man whose life as a resident and property holder in Stratford was recorded only in town documents out of the public eye. During the life of the Stratford William, no reference to that William stated or inferred that he was a writer of anything, plays, poems or even a letter. No reference to the author’s name on any published play or poem made any acknowledgment that he was the Stratford man as there were no references in any form to his identity, residence, age or what the person of that name had written before. All areas of reference were completely separate and all were sparse.

THE POPULARITY OF WILLIAM Robert J. Meyer

Many did not wait upon his death to tribute Jonson. William Hemminges in his ‘Elegy on Randoph’s Finger’ (1632 33) mentions ‘Ionson’ by name four times including: “And might the great Appollo please with Benn make the odd Number of the Muses ten” “The fluente Flettcher, Beaumonte riche in sence for Complement and Courtshypes quintesence. Ingenious Shakespeare, Messenger that knows The strength to wright or plott in verse or prose, Whose easye Pegasus Can Ambell ore Some threscore Myles of fancye in an hower, Clowd grapling Chapman whose Aeriall mynde Soares att philosophie and strickes yett blynd.”

William Hemminges is quite detailed about Beaumont and Fletcher, Messenger and Chapman, but can modify ‘Shakespeare’ only as ‘ingenious’.

The young dramatist, Francis Beaumont (b.1584) who had been writing plays in London since 1607, several with John Fletcher, wrote a poem ‘To Mr B.J.’ thought to be in 1615 as Beaumont died in 1616, the same year as William Shaxper but a month later. The poem of 44 lines ends with: “But know I write not these lines to the end to please Ben: Johnson but to please my friend: finis: FB:” In this poem, he has this to say: “Tis all I seeke for: heere I would let slippe (if I had any in mee) schollershippe, And from all learinge keepe these lines as (cl)eere As Shakespeares best are.”

These tributes continued to 1641 long after 1623 the year of the First Folio but what was the number of plays in the Folio of 1623 that were played upon the stage by 1641, how popular were those that before no one understood were written by any particular author ?

No play contained in the Folio was printed in Quarto with the name after 1609. To make some ‘explanation’ of this, biographers claim that William retired in 1609 as he was then ‘much too old’ to write, as if each play was printed as soon as the writing was finished. For five years after the death of the Stratford man in 1616, no author, poet or balladeer composed a verse, poem or a single line of passing reference to commemorate his name as a playwright or as an ordinary man. When Ben Jonson died in 1637, more than fifty poems were written to commemorate or praise Jonson in the following four years. Several were anonymous but many were written at some length by the more famous. The great George Daniel wrote poems to him in 1638 and 1639. William Cavendish wrote the twenty line ‘To Ben: Jonson’s Ghost’ in 1640. Thomas Beedome wrote several in 1641. In 1638, Sir Thomas Salisbury wrote ‘An Elegie meant vpon the Death of Ben: Johnson:’ of 32 lines that ends: “This were to doe like thee whose onelie penne wrote things vnutt’rable by other men”. Also in 1638, a 72 line poem contained the following dedication: “To Doctor Duppa, Deane of Christ Church, and Tutor to the Prince, An acknowledgement for his collection, in Honour of Ben Jonson’s memory.” It contained the opening“Howlines:shall I sleepe to night, that am to pay By a bold vow, a mighty Debt were Day?” and further: “Wealth of Ev’ry Muse, And t’will not pay the Debt wee own to thee, For humours done unto his TheMemory:”authorof this great tribute to Ben Jonson which says: “And now Posteritie is thought to know Why and to whom this mighty Summe they owe”, was none other than William Davenant, who made no tribute at all to the man whom he called his well spring of poetic wit, his ‘god father’, William Shaxper’.

During the decade, 1600 1610, appeared all of what are now considered to be the greatest theatrical literature, the most popular theatre, the four plays, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, yet Jonson’s plays, ‘Sejanus’ and ‘Volpone’, were mentioned far more often during these ten years. Several entire poems were written about the merits of these two Jonson plays, some by well-known writers. No poetry is so celebrated nor is any play now credited to William. No poem heralded him as either a player, or as a playwright.

What was Beaumont’s opinion and view to this name he mentions ? His collaborator, John Fletcher, had written plays by himself and with Philip Massinger, ‘The Spanish Curate’ in 1620, so Beaumont would not know of it. Scholars, centuries later, had claimed that Fletcher wrote, in cooperation with this same William, ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’ and ‘Henry VIII’.

If this were so, Beaumont would have known about it, but there is no comment upon this from Beaumont, Fletcher or Jonson as no one made such a claim when they were alive.

John Webster lists this name in the Preface to his ‘The White Devil” (1612). In mentioning those whose work he would wish his to be measured by, in their order: “Chapman, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and lastly (without wrong lastly to be named) the right happ y and copious industry of Master Shakespeare, Master Dekker and Master Heywood”.

In the numerous occasions where Jonson is named, it is often as ‘Ben: Jonson’ or ‘Benn’, but on those few occasions when William is named as the playwright, it is always ‘Shakespeare’ as remote in context before 1623 as it is long after, as if the plays are presented from ‘upon high’ or from ‘no one knows where’, never as if they came from good ‘Will Shaxpere’ or ‘Willy’, the one all knew so well. Did anyone associate these ‘Shakespeare’s best’ with the man living over the Mountjoy Silver Street wig-shop ? No one who knew this Willy claimed that he was the Poet.

If this is the only instance where a writer associates the name of the title page of Quartos to an actor, he is intimating that William ‘played some kingly parts’. This seems to be written in the past tense, so does this mean that in 1610, there is no longer a ‘Will. Shakespeare’ the poet ? None of these ‘tributes’ during Will’s lifetime seem to indicate that the authors, Beaumont, Davies, Webster, were familiar with a living man whom they knew. They seem like tributes to a name that accompanied certain works that they found worthy of praise. The name seems only that, a name referred to as they would refer the name of Cicero whom they knew only from a work credited to him. They wrote of ‘Shake speare’, never ‘William’ (except Davies) in the same manner that they would of ‘Cervantes’ in praising ‘Don Quixote’ which they may know from the original in Spanish or in an English translation, but of whom they knew nothing else. They may have known Terence (d. 159 b.p.) as well only by the works ascribed to him.

John Taylor, the Water Poet, who was present at the Globe Fire, wrote an elegy for Jonson, but not for William although he had said that William excelled at art and had survived on paper. (The Praise of Hempseed 1620)

The most enigmatic verse during William’s lifetime was in 1610 when John Davies of Hereford wrote: “To our English Terence, Mr Will. Shake speare Some say, good Will, which I in sport do sing: Hadst thou not played some kingly parts in sport, Thou hadst been a companion for a King, And been a king among the meaner sort.”

Jonson, Marlowe, Greene, Heywood and many other playwrights have left personal writings on several subjects including theatre and contemporary concerns and conditions, but there is no personal expression on any topic that was written by ‘William’.

The literate public was fully aware of Jonson’s plays and that Jonson was of their author. Jonson was the creator of popular masques and references to those masques were contained in the letters and correspondence of ambassadors and people of Rank and culture. A performance of Jonson’s masques was anticipated and commented upon in writing as their audiences were most literate. Jonson actually experienced what 19th and 20th century commentators apply to William, just as they applied to William the experience of a playwright adapting older plays, adding newly composed lines and writing new plays as they knew Jonson had done for Henslowe but that they never found in stated evidence that William had done.

Without naming any great tribute to their author, William, that was written ‘in his own day’, scholars assumed then that he must have been hailed as the greatest poet because of the firm impression made on the minds of audiences from the performances by actors in the characters of Hamlet, Lear and Macbeth. This may have seemed reasonable to those in the 19th century, but it was an erroneous assumption based only upon what were 19th and 20th century favourites of their day, not what were the most popular plays of 1600 to 1630 or even of 1700.

Jonson wrote productions that satirized contemporary figures and events of the day and was answered in plays by other playwrights as in ‘Satiromastix’ where in he received from them jibes and banter as he had given to others in his plays. No such production as a masque was ever credited to William and he was never mentioned in any of these plays of the ‘Theatre War’ as were others at the turn of the century. The Parnassus plays of the same years mentioned the author of the two poems ‘Venus’ and ‘Lucrece’ as the name of ‘W.S.’ was written below their Dedications but William was never named as a playwright in these university farces.

Yet the legend around the name that slowly enlarged eventually led authors in later centuries to say of ‘W.S.’ that “in his own day he was one of the best known figures in England held in high esteem, both as a man and poet while in his capacity of dramatic author he was not only immensely popular but was rated at something like his true value by most persons of taste and judgement”, as George Lyman Kitteridge asserted in 1916 without being able to name one person who acknowledged this about William ‘in his own day’.

Although plays from the Folio were presented many times to the public, not all of them were printed in Quarto. Some that were printed were not credited to anyone on the title page. There is no evidence that any of the play going or literate public as critical writers of their time ever associated these plays with William as they may have with those with that name on them No one ever mentioned William as the author of any unpublished play or a play without his name on it, with the sole exception of Francis Meres’ 600 page book on literature that had few readers that would notice that one page.

During the 17th century, based upon the number of times a play was alluded to in writings, the six most mentioned plays were six plays of Ben Jonson, ‘Catilene’, ‘Volpone’, ‘The Alchemist’, ‘Silent Woman’, ‘Sejanus’ and ‘Bartholomew Fair’ followed by ‘The Tempest’, ‘Othello’, ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Henry IV’. ‘Hamlet’ was further down the list after two other Jonson plays, ‘Poetaster’ and ‘Every Man in His Humor’. ‘The Tempest’, referred to as seventh, was not the Folio Tempest but either the Operatic version or the version devised by Davenant or Dryden.

No letter written by William has been found. Letters written by Ben Jonson exist in copies, discovered by Bertram Dobell and printed in 1901. Several were written c.1605 and are addressed to the Earl of Suffolk, another to a ‘noble Lord’, one to ‘Excellentest of Ladies’ probably the Countess of Bedford One is addressed ‘To the most nobly vertuous and thrice honor’d Earl of Salisbury’.

the impression that Jonson came upon the London theatre scene long after William since Ben was nine years younger than the Stratford William. In 1598 Jonson’s first play written entirely by him was produced at the Curtain Theatre. Until 1598, the only places in public print where the name of William appeared were in the two published poems of 1593 and 1594. The name appeared during 1598 in the Quarto of ‘Loue’s Labore Lost’ but only as ‘augmented by William Shakespeare’. Not until the publication of Jonson’s first private notes was any ‘connection’ known between Ben and William except for Ben’s verses in the Folio but still nothing of any personal knowledge of the ‘man’ was implied in his brief notes. Even before Jonson’s pronouncements on William, which were not written for ‘posteritie’, but they were posthumously published. Then mid 17th century essayists, including many of the clergy, were given full inspiration to invent stories of their fellowship and camaraderie. The Mermaid Tavern stories were imagined. These legends began with Thomas Fuller recording (c.1649) that ‘Many were the Wit Combates between him and Ben. Jonson’, a line that an anonymous author repeated in 1692 as “Witty Combats’.Another anonymous writer, whom C.H. Wilkinson thought was William Davenant, wrote a poetic broadside in 1660 that concerns Jonson’s play ‘The Alchemist’ which was in popular revival that year. In this 44 line poem: “Young Ben, not Old, writ this, when in his Prime. Solid in Judgement, and in Wit sublime, The Sisters, who at Thespian Springs their Blood at Bread Street’s Mermaid with our Poet din’d”, ‘our Poet’ being ‘W.S.’. John Aubrey’s notes on Sir Francis Stuart (1669 96), but not published then, say: “He was a learned gentleman, and one of the club at the Mermaid, in Friday Street, with Sir Walter Ralegh, etc., of that sodalities: heroes and witts of that time. Ben Jonson dedicates The Silent Woman to him”. Friday or Bread Street?

“Most Noble Earle: Neither am I or my cause so much vnknowne to youre Lordshipp, as it should drive mee to seeke a second meanes, or despaire of this to youre fauoure, (etc.) ”

This is the same William Herbert who, the encyclopaedia says: “used a great part of his wealth to support many of the artists of his time, including the English playwrights Ben Jonson and Philip Massinger”. Once again, that which is ascribed to William, but only after his lifetime, the same is found to be experienced by Ben Jonson and documented by him, in this instance during the early years when Ben was thirty two. Jonson was writing letters and he was writing them to the most influential people of the time. This also indicates that Ben was the one who not only wrote the Folio Dedication, but chose his own friends including Leonard Digges to write tribute verse for the Folio while choosing to use the names of the then long deceased actors to be the ones ‘responsible’ for collecting the Plays and printing of the BiographersFolio.leave

The first was directed to Philip Herbert, the Earle of Montgomery and the second to his brother, William Herbert, the 3rd Earle of Pembroke. These, of course, are ‘the most Noble and Incomparable Pair of brethren’ as ‘addressed’ by ‘Heminge and Condell’ in the Dedication inserted in the Folio of 1632. Here in 1605 is Ben Jonson writing to the 3rd Earle of Pembroke who was 25 at the time, and to his brother both of whom ‘Heminge and Condell’ say “Since you Lordships have been pleased to think these trifles something, heretofore; and have prosecuted both them and their Author living with so much favour . .”

Another letter by Ben is ‘To my honoured & vertuous friend Mr Tho: Bond Secretary to my ho: Lord the Lord Chancellor of England’. These are thought to be written from prison when Ben was jailed for the writing of ‘Eastward Ho’. Two letters are particularly noteworthy:“Most worthely honor’d - For mee not to solicite or call you to succoure in a tyme of such neede, were no lesse a sinne of dispaire, than a neglect of youre honor, (etc.) Ben: Jonson.”

Anthony Wood’s publication (1691 92) compiled short biographies of all those who attended Oxford University until that time. Although Ben Jonson did not attend Oxford, nor did anyone called ‘William Shakespeare’, Wood still mentions Jonson on 19 separate occasions always in connection with the Oxford person of whom he was writing. In all 19 instances, Jonson is named ‘Ben. Johnson’, but once as ‘Benj.’, another as ‘Ben. Joh.’. His reason for naming Jonson is often that Wood had evidence that Jonson had expressed an opinion on the particular person under discussion and several times Wood lists those authors who had praised the person’s work:“Our

author Daniel had also a good faculty in setting out a Mask or a Play, and was wanting in nothing that might render him acceptable to the great and ingenious men of his time, as to Sir Joh. Harrington the Poet, Camden the learned, Sir Rob. Cotton, Sir H. Spelman, Edm. Spencer, Ben Johnson, Joh. Stradling, little Owen the Epigrammatist.”

William’s name, although he would have been a contemporary, is not listed among the ingenious men of the time in any of the biographies. Ben Jonson is named in other men’s biographies by Wood and for Beaumont, Donne, R. Martin, John Davies, Robert Hayman and others. Once only is the name ‘Shakespeare’, not ‘William’, mentioned in Wood’s ‘Oxoniensis’ for the biography of Thomas Otway: “He was a man of good parts, but yet sometimes fell into plagiary, as well as his contemporaries, and made use of Shakespear, to the advantage of his purse, at least, if not his reputation.” Again, only the last name is referred to, and only as a name associated with the Folio and not as a person. ‘Shake speare’ equalled the Folio Plays. Wood on John Davies: “He was held in great esteem by the noted scholars of his time, among whom were Will. Camden, Sir Jo. Harrington the Poet, Ben. Johnson, Jo. Selden, Facete Hoskyns, R. Corbet of Ch. Ch. and others.” Wood on “Coryate’s Crudities’, 1611: “Which book was then usher’d into the world by an Odcombian banquet, consisting of near 60 copies of excellent verses made by the Poets of that time: (which did very much advantage the Sale of the book). Among them were Ben. Johnson, Sir Jo. Harrington of Kelston near Bathe, Dudl. Digges afterwards Master of the Rolls, Rich. Martin Recorder of London, Lau. Whittaker, Hugh Holland the traveller, Jo. Hoskyns Sen., Inigo Jones, the surveyour, Christop. Brook, Rich. Corbet of Ch. Ch., Jo. Donne, Mich. Drayton, Joh Davys of Hereford, &c.”

Here is a wide list of poets whose famous names ‘did very much advantage the Sale of the book’ and its date is 1611. Biographers have always been in haste to explain why some of the Folio Plays were ‘pirated’ into Quarto printings saying that the publishers considered Williams’ name to increase sales since he was so ‘famous’. Here is a 1611 compilation of verses without any inclusion of a verse by William. It seems that the Quarto books with his name activated the use of the name to a small degree but the name did not activate sales for the Quarto books. The poets are often referred to in Anthony a Wood’s compilation in 1691 covering the famous throughout the entire century. Of those listed above: Sir John Harrington is also listed in the Daniel and Davies biographies. Dudley Digges was a close relative of Leonard Digges whose poem is included in the Folio after Jonson’s verse. Both Wood and John Aubrey include Richard Martin (1570 1618) in their books. Wood: “There was no person in his time more celebrated for ingenuity that R. Martin, none more admired by Selden, Serjeant Hoskins, Ben. Johnson, &c than he; the last of which dedicated his Comedy to him called The Poetaster.” Oddly, Aubrey’s brief Life on Martin included: “He was a very handsome man, a graceful speaker, facetious and well beloved. I think he died of a merry symposiac.”

Another note said “Died of a symposiac excess with his fellow wits”.

This last poet ‘of lesser note’, William Basse, wrote one of the very few tributes to ‘Shakespeare’. Although printed in 1640, it was written before the death of Jonson in 1637.

This is a very similar description to the one that has been given about William’s demise.

Since there has never been recorded a description of William in appearance or in temperament, John Aubrey simply relies on copying a flattering depiction from his notebook on other ‘smooth wits’.Aubrey

The combination of the two notes presents the name notation that the Reverend John Ward of Stratford made about William Shaxper whom he never knew, that “Shakespeare, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drunk too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted”. Ward supplies the names of the most well known poets of the day for Aubrey’s ‘fellow wits’. He says ’drunk too hard’ for ‘symposiac excess’ and both Aubrey and Ward describe the drinking party as ‘merry’. Richard Martin died in 1618 or two years after Shaxper. Aubrey’s description of Martin is similar to his description of William: “He was a handsome, well shaped man, very good company and a very ready and pleasing smooth wit.”

says of Hugh Holland, the poet: “The Lady Elizabeth Hatton mother to Lady Purb. [Purbeck] was his great patroness (vie B. Jonson’s Masque of the Gipsies for these two beauties)”. Holland provided the second poem to Jonson for the Folio of 1632 and he died in 1633. It appears that those minor poets who contributed poems for the Folio were friends of Ben Jonson. This, along with his own tribute in verse and the great possibility that he also wrote the ‘Dedication’ and ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ for the Folio, would make it appear that Jonson was responsible for all of these commendations. Jonson, it seems from the biographical content for all of these poets, was quite involved with most of them and none of them were involved with William, even those who contributed verses for the Folio but they never gave any indication that they knew the identity of ‘W.S.’.

“Renowned Spencer lye a thought more nye To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumont lye A little nearer Spenser, to make roome For Shakespeare in your threefold, fowerfold Tombe.”

All too late in 1635 as Beaumont was buried in 1616 as was Shaxper and no one then suggested that William be buried in Westminster along with Chaucer and Spenser as they did a month later with Beaumont, for who, in 1616, knew that this ‘William’ would ever be considered to be ‘revealed’ in later years as the Great Architect of the Folio Plays ? Unfortunately, this strange supposition was not brought forward before William’s demise as then this entire farce could have been ended with a polite call upon those at the Great House on High Street.

Serjeant John Hoskins (1566 1638) is mentioned in the Martin biography and is given a listing by Wood: “ ‘Twas he that polish’d Ben Johnson the Poet and made him speak clean, whereupon he ever after called our author Father Hoskyns, and ‘twas he that view’d and review’d the History of the World, written by Sir W. Raleigh before it went to the Press”. Wood also lists another anthology of verse: “The verse in the said book called Annalia Dubrensia were composed by several Poets, some of which were the chiefest of the Nation, as Mich. Drayton Esq. Tho. Randolph of Cambridge, Ben Johnson, Owen Feltham Gent., Capt Joh. Mennes, Shakerley Marmion Gent., Tho. Heywood Gent, &c. Others of lesser note were Joh. Trussell Gent. who continued Sam. Daniel’s History of England, Will. Basse of Moreton near Thame in Oxfordshire, sometimes a Retainer to the Lord Wenman of Thame Park.”

The callers, first knocking at the door and then asking to see the famous writer, would then have been ushered into the presence of Susanna Shacksper Hall’s physician husband Dr Hall, who was a copious writer of matters of physike and who, after a hearty laugh, would have set the callers straight. Embarrassed gentlemen Exeunt.

Anthony a Wood’s ‘Anthenae Oxoniensis’ was published in 1691-92. Nearer the end of that century, another writer made his compilation on the writers of the early part of the century.

Under Gildon’s listing for the playwrights John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, he says: “Two Noble Kinsmen, a Tragi Comedy, fol. Mr. Shakespear assisted in the writing of this Play”. ‘Arraignment of Paris, a Pastoral’ is supposed by Kirkman to be “Mr. William Shakespear’s”, and the most puzzling of all, listed under the name ‘Christopher Marlow’: “A famous Poet of Queen Elizabeth and King James’s Time, contemporary with the Immortal Shakespear, was a Fellow Actor with Heywood, and others.” Charles Giddon, then, was not aware that Marlowe was not a ‘contemporary with’ a man whose identity was not known in 1593, not known to Chnarles Gildon in 1690 or to anyone in the 21st century. Speculation after only 60 years, 1690, and later in the 18th and 19th centuries, demonstrates how little the biographers and ‘scholars’ knew, but neglected to research, about the early 1600s that they profess to know and record for posterity and for future biographers to continue to repeat in their Eulogies of the Master Poet of the Ages, their Wullm. Shaxper of High Street, Stratford.

In the First Folio of 1623, only Jonson of the first rank poets wrote a Eulogy. The others were minor poets who, of course, never knew William: Leonard Digges, Hugh Holland and ‘I.M.’ who may have been one of several suggested poets including James Mabbe. John Millim, another ‘I.M.’, added a Sonnet in the 1632 Folio and probably at Jonson’s suggestion. In the 1640 edition of the ‘Poems’ an “Elegy on the Death of that famous Writer and Actor Master William Shakspeare’ was written anonymously and the name is spelled in the manner that appeared only on the Quarto King Lear, without the middle ‘e’.

It is pure speculation that Marlowe was a ‘fellow-actor with Heywood’ as there is no evidence that either poet acted upon the stage. Since the biographers claim that Marlowe was killed in May of 1593, he could hardly have been a ‘contemporary’ with anyone whose name had never appeared in London in any form until the fall of 1593, and, by the same claimed death of Marlowe in the spring of 1593, did Gildon in 1690 believe Marlowe to be a ‘poet…. of King James’s Time’ of 1603 ? Did he believe this easily proven false statement or did he merely crib the notes that Gerard Langbaine made eight years earlier ? Of Christopher Marlowe, Langbaine had written the similar statement: “An Author that was Cotemporary with the Incomparable Shakespear, and One who trod the Stage with Applause both from Queen Elizabeth, and King James. Nor was he accounted a less Excellent Poet by the judicious Johnson.”

Charles Gildon published his ‘The Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets’ in 1690 and the three quotations in which he mentions William indicate the utter vagueness of the knowledge of the age and the reliance upon rumour without substance or research.

Thus, at least by 1682 there existed no understanding of the late Elizabethan times as evident in many writings at the end of the century. However, many times these historical errors have been corrected by writers, later biographers still cling to the invented legends, anecdotes, rearranged ancient jeasts and continued inventions by contemporary writers in the late 17th century. There is no evidence that Marlowe ever acted on stage or anywhere else.

The understanding or the misunderstanding of what was a play by ‘Shakespeare’ in the late 17th century can be discerned from this statement by Francis Kirkman in 1671: “First, I begin with Shakespear who hath in all written forty eight. The Beaumont and Fletcher fifty two, Johnson fifty, Shirley thirty eight, Heywood twenty five, Middleton and Rowley twenty seven, Massenger sixteen, Chapman seventeen, Brome seventeen and D’avenant fourteen”.

It may be interesting to know how many of the plays of D’Avenant, the original spelling, were rewrites of the Folio Plays and how many of the remaining twelve he produced that added to the 36 to make the 48 ‘immortal plays’ reported by Kirkman ? Research into this number reveals that at one time in the 17th century more than 70 plays were stamped as genuinely having been written by the quill in hand of the ‘Incomparable’, supposedly ‘absolute in their numbers’ and ‘scarce received from him a blot in his papers’

‘Macbeth’ was the ninth most referred to name of a play in the entire 17th century but less than ten percent of the mentions were made before the year 1663 when Davenant produced his operatic version and most of the allusions were probably to this version. Samuel Pepys’ comments upon the Plays were upon the Davenant additions rather than upon the original Macbeth.Pepys had witnessed this operatic version nine times.

By this time, Jonson was spelled ‘Johnson’, and the final ‘e’ was severed from Marlowe and ‘Shakespeare’. The rarely referred to Author ‘at the height of his Fame’ in 1610 had risen further to the ‘Incomparable’ and to the ‘Immortal’ in 1690 but this laudation comes from those who knew less of the Plays than was known in 1616. Patrons were witnessing amalgamations conjured by Davenant and Dryden for the glorification of theatre entrepreneur Davenant.

The engraving of ‘William’ that appeared in the First Folio of 1623 was made by Martin Droeshout, the son of a Flemish engraver. Martin was fifteen years old when Shaxper died and twenty two when the First Folio appeared. Not knowing the true background of this engraving it may be surmised that the engraving must have been made from a portrait or a drawing that existed in the year of the engraving, sometime up to 1623, but this painting or drawing does not seem to exist today as no mention has been made of it. It was claimed that Ben Jonson “bore testimony in language which may mean that the engraver made his drawing from life”. If this were so, Martin Droeshout would have been less than fifteen years old at the time. Yet, the portrait is of a man of ‘thirty to thirty five’ and not fifty two and does not portray the build of the bust of William of Stratford that stands upon the wall of the Stratford church. The bust shows a man of round head, bald but for a rim of short hair around the bottom of the back of the head, no beard but a sharp goatee and a slim moustache turned up at the ends. If the portrait were earlier when William was thirty five from which the Droeshout engraving was taken, it would then have been kept for thirty five years, an engraving made from it and then the portrait must have been mislaid as that supposed portrait completely ‘disappeared’.

If Ben Jonson revered the ‘Master’ as much as the biographers claim, he would be expected to have kept the Droeshout rather than see harm come to it, as would Burbadge or any other member of the acting company as they all looked upon their theatrical keepsakes with pride to pass on to others in their wills. It could have been preserved at least at Dulwich College where the actor Ned Alleyne donated so many theatrical mementoes and records.

How could Jonson testify that ‘the engraver made his drawing from the life’ when the engraver Droeshout, would be at most fifteen when ‘William’ would be fifty one and the portrait shows a man of thirty five and quite unlike the bust.? The bust is claimed to have been modelled from a cast taken after death, or as some have suggested, and it is possible that the cast was made before his demise, as it is known that Shaxper had wanted a memorial to be set up just as the one which John Combe had made by the artist Gerard Johnson, whose real name was Gheerart Janssen who was one of family of sculptors working in their Southwark studios of London. Gheerart was sixteen in 1616 and the memorial is to have been placed in the church during or shortly after 1616. The bust on the wall in the present is now claimed in the ‘International Express’ of May 2, 2006 that “the church records reveal that this particular bust was not erected until 1748”.Thefamily of William had all knowledge of the memorial and it is logical that William would have wanted to have the mask made when he was still alive so that he could supervise and give his approval as well as being available for measurements and choosing all aspects of the memorial to himself as it is to be placed auspiciously in the Church for him to be as prominent a figure in perpetuity as was John Combe’s tomb. William had no hand in or any interest in the printing of any plays or any portraits that would accompany any plays in print. If he had he would have personally organized the entire endeavour as he did with his beloved memorial at Stratford. He wanted to be known as being as important a man as John Combe, to make it known that he, William Shaxper of Stratford, a poor boy who made as much a success at usury as Combe, who owned as many buildings as Combe and as much land as Sir Hugh Clopton that are mostly the same buildings and the same land that Combe owned and to be as long remembered as the Bishop of Stratford who gave his name to the town.

PORTRAITS AND BUSTS Robert J. Meyer

Many portraits of ‘Shakespeare’ appeared in later centuries but only four represent the most popular imagination to be the likeness of William and all represent the equally spurious others as all of the purported portraits of ‘W.S.’ are relevant to unknown gentlemen of a subsequent century turning up in attics and in art dealer shops in direct proportion to the growing curiosity about the ‘man’, William.

The portraits were named by the name of the person who supposedly last owned each, the most famous being the Flower, the Jansen, the Felton and the Chandos ‘The Flower’ received its name from the purchaser, Mr Edgar Flower, who found the portrait “on a panel made of two planks of old elm” with ‘Willm Shakespeare 1609’ painted on the upper left hand corner. At the time of 1882, it was in the possession of Mr H.C. Clements of Peckham Rye who had purchased it in 1840 from an ‘obscure dealer’ who represented it as “the original portrait of Shakespeare”, from which, it is claimed, the now famous Droeshout engraving was taken and inserted in the first collection of his works”. The date reveals it as a fraud.

“A curious portrait of Shakespeare, painted in 1597” as it was called when exhibited in the European Museum, King Street, St James Square, London in 1792. A Mr Felton bought it for five guineas and, upon inquiring into the portrait’s history, was told by the Museum that it “was purchased out of an old house known by the Sign of the Boar, in Eastcheap, London, where Shakespeare and his friends used to resort” and the report says, it “was painted by a player of that time”. Two years later, the same Museum manager, Mr J. Wilson, said that the picture had been found several years before “at a broker’s shop in the Minories, by a man of fashion whose name must be concealed”, and that it was sold to the museum out of that gentleman’s collection. In 1792, the fashion was to find relics of William and they appeared, but it is strange that in the stories about them, no new evidence ever surfaced. It was always based on the old legends of frequenting the ‘Boars Head’ or of being painted by a ‘player’ when they learned that Richard Burbadge had painted his own portrait. The most famous and the most reproduced portrait is the Chandos, and very little is written about it as to when it was first found or who painted it. It is still considered the most ‘authentic’ but this painting of the bearded man with the gold ring in his left ear has been given the legendary background with the most interesting names, possibly to establish it with greater belief in its authenticity. It appears in the majority of books on Shakespeare but not always as other similar pictures appear but always with no artist credited. The Chandos is now in the National Portrait Gallery in London. It has been traced back “from its place in the Bridgewater Collection, up through the Chandos collection and the hands of Mr Nichol, a Mr Robert Keck, and Mrs Barry the actress to the possession of Betterton the actor”.

While Betterton owned it, an engraving was made from it by Vandergucht and used by Nicholas Rowe to print in his edition of the Plays in 1709. Tracing back its history, the English actress, Elizabeth Barry (1659-1713) is said to have owned it. Before her, Thomas Betterton, the 17th century actor inherited it from Sir William Davenant. That this devious Davenant owned it gives justification to the choice of the characteristics portrayed in the portrait’s subject.

This portrait, rather than being the portrait from which the Droeshout made the engraving is a portrait so resembling the Droeshout that the Flower could have been inspired by it. The Flower is a more competent work as in it, the eyes are softer, the nose is thinner, but the brows, mouth and hair around the mouth are very similar. The collar lines are similar but not exact, yet the costume is an almost exact copy of the Droeshout Another, the ‘Jansen’, is an oil painting bearing the date ‘1610 Aet. 46’ and it is supposedly by a painter ‘of uncertain antecedents’, Cornelius Jansen, but it, too, resembled the Droeshout engraving so closely as to be a copy of it. This is purported to be a portrait by ‘Jansen’ and the bust was formed by Gheerart Janssen.

The source of this legend is William Oldys (1696 1761) who lived in a later century from Davenant and so he neither heard Davenant discourse upon the picture’s derivation nor heard Betterton relate his version of the story and so he must have embellished the legend with his own variations. The origin is supposedly another of ‘William’s fellows’, Joseph Taylor, who first owned the portrait, and the brushwork is attributed to none other than Richard Burbadge himself. Richard is known to have painted his own portrait but the ‘Chandos’ is not in the style or of the texture of the Burbadge self-portrait. Ironically, the Chandos, if chosen by Davenant to be his idol of parental likeness, closely resembles, with the gold ring in the ear, the dandies of the times who would stand about the street corners to announce, with the smugness and dress of one who had seen the sights of ancient Rome, that they were, by that sole accomplishment, now several rungs above the passers by.

The most prominent portrait of ‘W.S.’ then, the likeness that all have taken for granted portrays the real Master Poet, the ‘Bard of Avon’, the glamorous Chandos portrait was owned and therefore exhumed somewhere by the teller of fabulous but mystery shrouded legends, the heir of the parent himself, William of Oxon weekends. Davenant acquired this most revealing portrait, as a legend or as his own imagination tells it, “as a legacy from a John Taylor, who painted it from life”. Bearded, gold ring in the ear, the portrait is far from the man who can be witnessed in three dimensions in the Church at Stratford but the Chandos comes far closer to the legend of the man as engineered so precisely by Sir William Davenant.

Now he had not only the legends that he could weave so well, but a palpable portrait that he can brandish at his Theatre, a picture, unknown for decades, that he can produce as proof of the Author of the Plays he presents, and his own relationship to the Master from whom he gained his many Atalents.story

This ‘letter’ was supposedly once to be in the “hands of Davenant”. William Oldys says that the Duke of Buckingham told Lintot that he had seen such a letter in Davenant’s possession. This is in a manuscript note to his copy of Fuller’s ‘Worthies of England’. Yet, Davenant, it is said, “is the poorest possible authority for any story about Shakespeare”.

3 Sir William, claiming to be the Oxford progeny of ‘Stratford William’ and thereby heir to his literary and theatrical talent, would be likely to choose the most flattering and intriguing portrait of a man whom he would best prefer to display as his paternal Prince of Poetry. Davenant did not leave any hint as to how he came into possession of the portrait.

first published in 1710, the year after Rowe’s biography, in Lintot’s edition of poems that he ascribes to ‘Shakespeare’, includes a tale that tells of a letter by no less a personage than King James himself, a despot, it must be remembered, “as petty and capricious as he was tyrannical”, who took time out from tyranny to pay tribute to William, the purpose supposedly that the ‘prophecy’ in ‘Macbeth’, that the line of Kings would come from Banquo and not from Macbeth was being complemented by King James I whose ancestor was Banquo. Who made the prophecy ? In the play, it is the prophetic statements of the three witches, but who made the prophecy, the writer of the Play ? Was it mentioned in the Chronicles from which the play was fashioned, or was this a natural assumption in the year in which ‘Macbeth’ was written? That was 1605, they say, two years after James had already mounted to the throne of England Where is the mystery of ‘prophecy’ that James would write a letter “with his own hand” amicably complimenting the author for such an inclusion as ‘prophecy’ of an already accomplished act by three imperfect speakers, the hags from hell ?

Martin Droeshout who produced the engraving for the First Folio was only 15 when William died and so he never saw him or any man called ‘Shakespeare’. There is always something missing in the Legend of William. Each situation is barely on the edge of possibility while being well beyond probability. The life sized bust of William at the church is also a mystery in its creation.The Sculptor, Gheerhart Janssen was 16 when William died, another boy artist who most likely never saw the man whose likeness he is commissioned to duplicate, but the face, the most crucial aspect, is claimed to be from a death mask or it may have been taken before he died. William would have wanted a monument just as elaborate as Combe’s tomb and would have requested the same artist or a member of the same artist’s family. The entire bust would display the true likeness in size, shape and appearance of the 52 year old Man of Stratford.

There is no document found or statement made by Sir William Davenant that he ever visited Stratford to visit his ‘parent’ or ‘god father’ but it was Davenant who sought out and decided upon the Chandos painting to buy and present as the true portrait of his fabulous ‘father’. A significant part of the ensuing legend is that Droeshout used the Chandos to make the engraving and this suggestion led most ‘experts’ to see positive similarities not only between the Chandos and the engraving but between both and the Janssen bust.

So many of the biographers from 1700 to the present never seem to check the dates of the lifetime of the person they claim had done something. Professor Peter Levi in his ‘The Life and Times of William Shakespeare (1988)’ refers to Oldys as ‘another Restoration actor’ (P193).

Why is every last facet of a ‘William’ story steeped in situations just short of credibility ?

It was later stated that Ben Jonson attested that the Folio engraving was William’s exact likeness but Droeshout’s engraving was of a man of about 35 and so Droeshout must have worked from a painting or a sketch of a man whom he had never seen and the 52 year William no longer existed. This statement was invented to indicate that Jonson knew ‘Shakespeare’ personally but it was found to be a fraud and that there was no man called Shakespeare for Jonson to know because late in the 20th century it was proven by a woman that this Droeshout engraving, by computer comparison, exactly matched, in the outline and in all facial features, an existing portrait of Queen Elizabeth.

Since Davenant died in 1668, eight years after his Theatre work from 1660. Betterton who was 33 at the time, could have had the Chandos for 42 years until his own death in 1710, but Elizabeth Barry died only three years later which suggests that the Oldys legend was put together to include well known names of the era or well known to Oldys without regard to the probability of Betterton passing the portrait on to the actress Barry.

William Oldys not only was not an actor but he was not born until the end of the century, (1696 1761), He was a writer and bibliographer, a librarian to the Earl of Oxford. Is Professor Levi not familiar with the wild legends that Oldys has left in his several volumes of historical anecdotes ?

In the same paragraph, Prof. Levi identifies Joseph Taylor, the actor, as “Shakespeare’s colleague”. Mr Taylor joined the King’s Men three years after William of Stratford died. John Downes wrote in 1708 that Mr Taylor was one of “the Black Fryers Company” Despite the accepted ‘authenticity’ of the Chandos, many 20th century books on the subject of ‘Shakespeare’ are illustrated on their covers or opposite the front pieces with portraits, old and new that have little resemblance to the ‘Chandos, the Folio engraving or the Stratford bust. Rather, they further the illusion of a slim man with moustache and beard, high forehead, long nose, and a more pointed chin than does the ‘Chandos’, or the Droeshout and all are far from the appearance of the face on the bust. Numerous other portraits are found in books about William.

The portrait of Richard Burbadge has the same pose and angle as the man in the ‘Chandos’ with similar moustache, pointed beard and white collar and could as well have been claimed to be ‘W.S.’ as any other that was forwarded as being of the elusive man.

Another replication of ‘Shakespeare’, this one is a bust that was made in 1740 by Peter Scheemakers (1691 1770) based upon a design by William Kent whose work can be seen in the ceilings of the rooms at Hampton Court. This bust is in Westminster Abbey and a copy is in Leicester Square garden. The design was derived from the ‘Chandos’.

There is a portrait called the Grafton portrait with a date in the upper right hand corner of 1588. This is a portrait of a man with the same pose, same angle. The appearance of a date does not indicate that the picture is a fraud as the early date was added to claim that ‘William’ had his portrait painted long before the name was ever known in print in 1593. However, the Flower does contain the name ‘Willm Shakespeare 1609’ and this must be a forgery as otherwise this would be the single incidence of the name appearing anywhere other than on the Quartos before 1623 and with no one ever noticing the name until 1840.

The ‘Gerard Soest’ portrait by that 17century painter is an example of an ‘old’ portrait of this type. [Shakespeare Birthplace Trust] Many such ‘old’ portraits are never identified as in the front piece of ‘The Complete Shakespeare’, Books Inc. 1939, where the figure is turned to his left whereas other similar figures are turned to their right. In the comparison of these portraits, all are of different men but with the similar distribution of head and facial hair. Illustrations of the 20th century follow these same attributes accenting the face with a pointed beard that resembles any number of circa 1600 portraits of men from ‘Henry Wriothesley in the Tower’, the Earl of Northampton who is second from the right in the ‘The Somerset House Conference’ of 1604, or the face of Walter Ralegh in the portrait of him and his son, by an unknown artist, with high forehead, long nose, dark moustache and pointed beard, closer by far to how William is pictured in books today than the ‘Chandos which is far different than existing portraits of Richard Burbadge, William Sly, Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson, contemporaries not of nobility.

John Stow wrote: ‘The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer’ 1561, ‘Summaries of Englyshe Chronicles’ 1565, ‘Annales of England’ 1580, and ‘A Survay of London’, 1598-1603. He was considered “the most accurate and businesslike” of the 16th century. His literary patron was Archbishop Parker. In 1604, the year before he died, Stow qualified for a license to collect alms.

This is known from the man who heard the sermon and wrote about the aftermath, the historian John Stow, born in 1525, who published his life long work in his ‘Survay of London’. When he died in 1605, a monument was placed inside this same St Andrews Undershaft where the inscription reads. “He exercised the most careful accuracy in searching ancient monuments, English annals and records of the City of London. He wrote excellently and deserved well both his own and subsequent ages”

Henry VIII banned the popular May Day festivity of the ‘Morrice’ dance around the Maypole, after the ‘disorders’ of that day in 1517 when many people were killed in the riots that ensued. Until that time, the May pole erected at the crossroads of St Mary Axe and Leadenhall Street was so tall that if left standing, it would dwarf the adjacent church of St Andrew, so after each festivity it was stored on iron brackets under the eves of the church giving it the name of St Andrews Undershaft. There the pole remained until 1549 when the residents of Shaft Alley, hell fired by a sermon in near by St Paul’s, swarmed down Cornhill Street to take down the shaft and to burn the wooden symbol of idolatry.

This monument formed with the approval of the family and most possibly of the man himself, contains no emblem or object either symbolic of the theatre or of literature, except for the ‘quill pen’ which someone inserted into the right hand in a later century Separate from this is a gravestone on the floor “between that of Ann Shakespeare which is next the north wall bearing the monument, and that of Susanna Hall”. This stone bears no name.

Dowdall is the first to record the legend that William wrote these lines. He does not say who told this to him or whether it was taken for granted that William wrote it. Robert Dobyns said earlier in 1673: “… transcribed these two Epitaphs, the first is on William Shakespeare’s monument: the other is upon ye monument of a noted usurer ‘Good friend for Jesu sake forebeare To dig the Dust that lyeth incloased here. Blessed is the man that spareth these stones. Cursed be he yt moveth these bones’”. [y=th] This is not on the monument but on the gravestone on the floor away from the bust. Dobyns version varies from the wording recorded twenty years later by Dowdall whose wording is correct except the words that should be ‘inclosed heare’. In 1694, William Hall wrote to Edward“DearThwaites:Neddy, I very greedily embraced this occasion of acquainting you with something which I found at Stratford upon Avon. That place I came unto on Thursday night, and ye next day went to visit ye ashes of the Great Shakespear which lye interr’d in that Church. The verses which in his lifetime he ordered to be cut upon his tombstone (for his Monument have others) are these which follow: Reader, for Jesus’s Sake forbear To dig the dust enlosed here: Blessed be he that Spares these Stones And cursed be he that moves my bones. The little learning these verses contain would be a very strong argument of ye want of it in the Author; did not they carry something in them which stands in need of comment”. Hall then describes the ‘curse’ put upon the grave and then ends: “they have laid him full seventeen foot deep, deep enough to secure him. And so much for Stratford. Your friend and Servant Wm Hall”.

Twenty years later, a similarly styled monument, yet infinitely more ornate, would contain a framed figure ‘seated’ in like manner with no book upon its small table but a thick cushion on which the left hand rests on the hand a tasselled cushion, the eyes of the man looking straight forward. This monument on the wall of the Stratford church is installed high above the head of anyone.This monument has been described in a later century as: “A central niched arch contains a half-length ‘bust’ of the poet, whose hands rest with pen and paper on a cushion before him. This is flanked by Corinthian columns, supporting a cornice. Beneath is a tablet with the inscription. On the cornice is a square block with the arms, helm, and crest in relief. It has pyramidal top, with a skull at the apex, and is flanked by two small nude figures, on mounds, one with a spade, the other with second skull and an inverted torch”.

The alabaster monument fixed into the wall of the church is a life sized replica of John Stow recessed into an ornate frame. The bearded figure of Stow, dressed in a draped robe and a ruffled collar, is seated at a marble table with a fringed cloth, his eyes looking down as the two hands rest upon an open book, a goose quill in the hand as if writing in the book. The monument is at floor level fronted by iron fencing.

In 1693, a Mr Dowdall wrote on April 10th, “Neare the wall where his monument is Erected Lyeth a plaine free stone, vnderneath w ch his bodie is Buried with this Epitaph, made by himself a little before his Death. Good friend, for Jesus sake forbeare to digg the dust inlosed heare. Bles’t be the man that spares these stones and Curs’t be he that moves my bones !”.

The drawing made by Dugdale in c1650-56 shows no pen or paper. None of the 17th century recorders of their visits to the church describes the bust in any detail. There would be no reason for them to question where the pen and paper were, as they would merely accept the bust as they saw it. All of them copied down or remembered the ‘verses’ on the tombstone in different wordings. They do not record any colouring or clothing but the bust was coloured at one time.

Hall is open to anything that is told to him. He, too, hears that William wrote or dictated the verses, as he is only known as signing his name, and that William is seventeen feet down which is unlikely being that close to the Avon River, but he does, at least, perceive that the ‘Author’ is in want of a little learning. It has only been a year since Dowall observed that the verse began ‘Good friend’ and now Hall sees it as ‘Reader’. Both men differ in what they read on the stone.

J. O. Halliwell, in his ‘Wit and Wisdom’ quotes this ‘c1630 Rawl MS’ which was very old by the time of printing: “Epitaphe on a Bakere For Jesus Christe his sake forbeare To dig the bones under this biere; Blessed is hee who loves my duste, But damned bee he who moves this cruste !” Halliwell also says that the present stone in the floor is not the original stone, but was substituted “about ninety years ago” or about 1760 and “the finger and thumb were again replaced by William Roberts of Oxford in 1790 and a quill inserted to represent the pen.” The monument would seem to present a problem in that it is known that ‘the family’ ordered it to be made and installed, it is rationally assumed that the likeness to William is close as the face is said to be a death mask. One later critic said that the bust looks “more like a prosperous butcher”. The bust does not have any similarity to any of the ‘portraits’ that were ‘found’ in later centuries.

E. K. Chambers, who in two volumes collected every known reference in writing or in print up to the 20th century either to the name ‘Shakespeare’ or to the Plays and the productions, says in his description of the monument, “A central niched arch contains the half length bust of the poet whose hands rest with pen and paper on a cushion before him”. It would seem that a soft cushion would not be the best surface on which to write on a single sheet of paper with a quill pen. The ‘paper’ is under the left hand on the cushion and a genuine quill is placed between the fingers of the right hand.

Sir William Dugdale, as noted in an almanac of 1653, ascribes the workmanship to ‘one Gerard Johnson’, or Janssen, who had also produced the monument for John Combe of Stratford two years before. Gerard, or Gheerart, was the son of Gheerart Janssen (d 1611) who conducted a business with his four sons. Dugdale made a drawing of the monument and this still exists. An engraving of this drawing was made with fair fidelity by Hollar, or his assistant, Gaywood, for the ‘Antiquities of Warwickshire’ 1656, written by Dugdale . This engraving and drawing differ singularly from the monument. The bust itself is elongated; the elbows project angularly; the face is narrow and melancholy, the moustache droops, and there is no pen and no paper. Two explanations have been given for the discrepancies. One is that such was the way of the conscienceless of the 17th century engravers, and that, learned as Dugdale was on tenures, genealogy and heraldry, there are other monument illustrations in his book that completely misrepresent the originals. The other explanation comes from a Mrs Stopes who believes that the repairing and beautifying that occurred in 1748 amounted to a considerable reconstruction through which the present aspect of the monument replaced that which was faithfully recorded by Dugdale. A comment upon the puzzle was published: “It would be simpler to accept the alternative suggestion of Sir George Greenwood that another bust was substituted for the original one, but the whole theory seems to me a mare’s nest. It certainly gets no support from Stratford documents disinterred by Mrs. Stopes.”

“On 15 Nov 1793 [Edmund] Malone wrote to Lord Charlemond that on a visit to Stratford in the fore going summer he had done ‘a public service’. With the permission of the vicar, James Davenport, he had ‘brought’ the bust ‘back to its original state, by painting it a good stonecolour.’” “In 1861 the stone colour was removed by Simon Collins and the present colours put on the scarlet doublet might perhaps be taken to represent the official livery of the King’s Men.”The bust as originally seen and approved by ‘the family’ of William did not include a pen or paper. Only the soft cushion “green above and crimson below, the cord and tassels black”, his hands resting upon the pillow in a position to perform the task with which all Stratford was familiar upon the soft muffling surface the counting out of little stacks of shilling pieces of gold.

PORTRAITS Robert J. Meyer

In the Horizon Carousel publication ‘Shakespeare’s England (1964), four portraits are reproduced that indicate how the popular image of William had idealized away from the bust in the church at Stratford and away from the Chandos portrait.

On Page 80, by ‘courtesy of Frank de Heyman, Brooklyn, N.Y.’ is a portrait of two men playing chess, supposedly the men are Ben Jonson and William, and this portrait is credited to ‘a Dutchman, Karel van Mander; painted in 1603’. Both men are holding the chessboard with their left hands. All else visible in the picture are two white quill pens and two black square ink wells on a box on a table in the background between the men.

In the ‘chess’ portrait, William wears a broad black hat, a wide white collar over the shoulders but the face is slim, with long nose, and pointed chin so popular today. Also not looking in the least like the bust or the ‘Chandos’ is the statue monument placed into the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey in 1740 and designed by William Kent who had painted some of the ceilings in Hampton Court. This is the facial image repeated in the bust in Leicester Square and the white bust in the Folger ‘Shakespeare’ Library, often copied for sale in shops. In the collection in the Corcoran Gallery of Art is another painting where the idealized figure is centrally seated at a table surrounded by at least fourteen ‘contemporaries’ including Jonson, appearing not even slightly similar to his portrait, Ralegh at least dressed as Ralegh, leaning upon the shoulder of Southampton not looking like Southampton’s portraits. Another Victorian Vision ? No date is credited to the painting.

In 1603, William of Stratford was 39 and Ben was 30. Yet, ‘William’, looking much younger than ‘Ben’, is portrayed as clean shaven, pudgy faced, stubby nosed, and has short cropped hair, in facial appearance not similar to the well known portrait of him in the Folio, the etching that Jonson ‘claimed’ looked quite like the man, showing him with longer hair and with a full beard. This engraving was found fraudulent when a woman in the 20th century by computer laid this portrait over one of Queen Elizabeth showing all the features, face, eyes, nose and mouth, to line exactly one over the other.

The acting company was owned and operated only by the three Burbadges, the father and his two sons, and they spelled their name in this manner with a ‘d’. From these reviews at least one writer has made the argument that Shaxper died of typhoid fever but his physician son in law does not leave that reason for his death in his record files. One writes, “Father John Gerard, who seems never to have met Shakespeare” but no one had ever stated that he met him or saw him from a distance. Others still continue to refer to “Shakespeare’s Company” and to “Shakespeare’s old patron the Earl of Southampton” while they must realize that the only ‘evidence’ of the former is a forgery and that Southampton was never a patron to anyone.

The Times Literary Supplement, London, often reviews the latest books regarding ‘Shakespeare’ occasionally four or five at a time as in the August 19 & 21, 2005 edition that reviewed four on pages 6 to 8, another on page 8, five more on page 10 with another on page 11. In the essays there and in others of the ‘TLS’, excerpts still confirm that the old tales and assumptions about ‘Shakespeare’ are still repeated indicating that they are still regarded as factual. From this 2005 edition: “We have a huge number of allusions … from fellow-writers and others in the London theatre world who knew him [Shakespeare] well (Greene, Meres, Jonson, Heywood, Webster, Marston, Gabriel Harvey, Chettle, Weever, Dekker) an almost continuous series of references from 1592 to his death in 1616, all of which identify him as both actor and author.”

“There is firm evidence that Southampton and Pembroke gave Shakespeare their patronage.” Pembroke was patron for an entire acting company of players of which Shakespeare was not a member nor of any acting company. To reveal these and other fallacies in detail is the purpose of this book, ‘Shake spurious’.

None of these named men ever claimed to have met or to have seen the Author of the Plays. There is but one reference to ‘William Shakespeare’ as an actor, in the printed plays of Ben Jonson. William is listed as playing two roles in Jonson plays. Who included that name as Ben never met anyone with that name ? “Jonson took issue with Shakespeare’s fellow actors (such as Heminge and Condell who edited the First ‘HemingeFolio).”andCondell’, members of the company of actors never ‘edited’ or took any manuscripts to the printer. “…his patron Southampton.” “There is firm evidence that Southampton and Pembroke gave Shakespeare their patronage.” “with Shakespeare’s old patron the Earl of Southampton.” (TLS August 15. 2008)

Pembroke was patron to an acting company. The Earl was patron to no one. He gambled with his“…Shakespeare’smoney. acting company…” (TLS Aug 15, 2008) “…the effect on Shakespeare’s company…” (TLS October 12, 2007)

PREFACE to ‘SHAKE SPURIOUS’ Robert J. Meyer

No known person from London ever visited Mr William Shaxper in Stratford or called at his house before or after his death in 1616. No one had ever heard that the Author was claimed to be Mr Shaxper until reading the poem by Leonard Digges in the 1632 Folio that contains the words, ‘thy Stratford moniment’ and then no one went to Stratford to find a still-living relative. No one went to Stratford to find any evidence of ‘Shakespeare’ until the middle of the 19th century. Books are still being written in the 21st century about ‘Shakespeare’.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica opens the entry, ‘Shakespeare the man’, with “The amount of factual knowledge available about Shakespeare is surprisingly large for one of his station of life”, but the station of whose life is now understood as the life of a man who was born in Stratford on April 23rd in 1564 but died as the most-wealthy gentleman in the village in 1616.

This is almost the entirety of the ‘large amount’ of ‘factual knowledge’ reported by the biographer who wrote the Britannica entry. The remainder of the several pages are filled with information that applied to everyone in Stratford, reworked trivia with original reference to others in rhyme and his supposed links to London theatre companies to ‘explain’ his being a ‘dramatist and “Seventeenthpoet’.century

The ‘serious life’ was a collection of local tales and witticisms that had applied to others in the past but with William’s name inserted for the original derided prey. Rowe depended upon another who did not visit Stratford but submitted the fables and satiric verse.

“About 1661 the vicar of Stratford wrote in his diary: “Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard; for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.”

‘SHAKE SPEARE’ UNKNOWN Robert J. Meyer

antiquaries began to collect anecdotes, but no serious life was written until 1709, when Nicholas Rowe, the Poet Laureate, tried to assemble information from all available sources.”

The amount of ‘factual knowledge’ about the Author of the Plays is exactly the four occasions before 1600 when the ‘name’ in more than one spelling was published on two Plays and on two books of Thepoetry.‘large

amount of factual knowledge’ about the gentleman of Stratford is no more than the entries in Stratford Town’s record books accorded to everyone in town, a few documents of the purchase of houses and land and one letter from a friend dealing with monies. There exists only a scrawled signature on each page of the four pages of that gentleman’s will and one upon the purchase a property in London and one on the paper when he mortgaged it the following day. He never sold any property or land or any other of his possessions that he had accumulated. He left no papers, and no books were in his possession at his retirement when he and his wife, Anne, were living with a daughter and her husband, a physician who willed all his own papers and library to his son in law, and none contained any statement that would indicate that the physician’s father in law ever wrote anything including a letter.

The ‘factual knowledge’ about this gentleman was gathered beginning only in the middle of the 19th century by one person going from London to Stratford to examine the town’s official records. The only reason for considering this man with a similar name as the Author of the Plays are the words ‘your Stratford moniment’ in a verse of tribute that was included in the Second Folio of the Plays in 1632. Before that year no one had referred to anyone in London as the Author. Not one person had given evidence of knowing the Author personally. No one connected with the London theatre ever visited the man in Stratford nor did anyone ever visit any of the man’s surviving relatives after the word ‘Stratford’ was noticed in the Folio.

“No name was inscribed on his gravestone in the chancel of the parish church of Stratford upon Avon.” “Within a few years, a monument was erected on the chancel wall. It seems to have existed by 1623.” “Shakespeare’s will was found in 1747 and his marriage license in 1836. The documents concerning the Mountjoy lawsuit were found and printed in 1910.” “Shakespeare did not go on to the university” “Instead, at the age of 18 he married.”

The World Book under the heading ‘Early career in London’ devotes 39 lines to the same word, “Shake scene” calling this “some indication” that Shakespeare had become well known in London theatrical life by 1592. Other misinformation is guardedly forwarded in the statements, “shortly after he married at the age of 18, Shakespeare apparently left Stratford to seek his fortune in the theatrical world of London”, “probably joined one of the city’s repertory theatre companies” and “By 1612, when he seems to have partially retired to Stratford”, with their cautious safeguard words of ‘apparently’, ‘seems to have’, and the byword of all his biographers, ‘probably’ There is no evidence that William of Stratford “partially” retired.

“He is supposed to have left Stratford after he was caught poaching in the deer park of Sir Thomas Lucy, a local justice of the peace.” This is pure invented folklore that is ‘supposed’ “…apparently arrived in London about 1588 and by 1592 he had attained success as an actor and as a playwright. Shortly thereafter he secured the patronage of Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton…” There is no evidence of him being in London in 1588 or of his attaining success by 1592 as an actor that relates entirely to that one word ‘shake-scene’.

A vicar in 1661 would have no ability to know that this was true in 1616 but a twentieth century biographer used this ‘merry meeting’ without crediting the vicar for his information but claimed that the death was caused by the three standing outside on a spring evening. Jonson and Drayton wrote nothing about such a meeting.

Another reference in the Britannica concerns ‘what he must have done’ since the event occurred before 1616 including “walking at the coronation of King James I in 1604” “as a member of the King’s Men” for which there is no evidence. This ends the ‘factual’ and ‘un factual’ life of William in the Britannica.

The listing then spends 11 lines on the ‘proof’ that William was an actor in 1592 upon the ‘evidence’ of a single word by a playwright in a “pamphlet” that was a warning to three other playwrights of how actors continue to make money upon the work of the writers. Originally all nouns were capitalized but this one word, ‘Shake-scene’, is left capitalized today while all other nouns are de capitalized which deliberately implies that the word is a name or a play upon the name ‘Shake speare’ while ignoring that the word is a clever description of an unnamed actor being a ‘scene shaker’. To rely upon this single word indicates how desperate biographers are to establish that the Stratford William was an acclaimed actor in London at as early a date as they have found possible but this printed statement was in the Spring of 1593while the first genuine reference to the Author by name was entered into a list at the London Registry Office in the Fall of 1593 that was required for a book to be published at a future date.

The Funk and Wagnall’s Encyclopedia (1975) goes even farther with misconstrued information. “According to one tradition he was apprenticed to a butcher because of his reverses in his father’s financial situation” whereas in that ‘tradition’ he was a youth and the father’s finances were not involved. “According to another account he became a schoolmaster.”

The World Book, a newer encyclopaedia, 2008 edition, follows the tradition of listing the official Stratford documented details of Birth, Marriage and Death of the village resident, extended information common to all residents including “grammar school” or Free School facilities and the repetition of outright fables of the 17th century that are mostly older fables now applied to the Stratford man.

These ‘traditions’ have him as going to London at 18 and being a schoolmaster without attending a university and with no evidence of his completing ‘free school’.

This is not ‘known’ but only interpreted by this biography’s author as no playwright could be responsible for a nobleman commanding one of his plays to be performed in a particular circumstance and at an unfortunate time. The authors sold their plays to the playing company and had no further responsibility for them.

Also bearing the name are three plays of 1600 ‘By Will Shakespeare’ ‘The History of King Stephen’, ‘Duke Humphrey’, ‘Iphis and Tantha’ and ‘The History of Sir John Oldcastle’ (Quarto 1619) [after William of Stratford’s death] Who now has seen the play Locrine ? Who enjoyed so well the spell of Cromwell ? Which velvet curtain arose on The Puritan ? Where the well done spectacle of London Prodigal ? Who has forked out for the Yorkshire Tragedy ? Have these five plays gained all their success By being claimed to be by ‘W.S.’ ?

Author Keith Wrightson in his ‘English Society 1580 1680” speaks of the amount of illiteracy in the villages and counties. “While county rates for illiteracy were generally within a fairly narrow range, the illiteracy rates of individual parishes within counties could vary enormously. Cornwall had an illiteracy rate of 92% but the best had a rate of only 54%.” (P 184199) William of Stratford leaving no books or papers and no evidence of his ability to write other than his scrawled signature, it can only be concluded that he could neither write nor read but concentrated upon numbers as a shrewd investor and a money lender who moved his residences about London. If he ever had books, they would have stayed at his residence of New Place as his will indicates that he never sold anything that he bought or already owned.

In the book of poetry, Shakespeare is to have dedicated it to the Earl of Southampton seeking him as a patron but there is no evidence that he was accepted as the Earl never gave patronage to any of the several poets who sought the same patronage.

He belonged to no theatre company and there is no non forged document to say that he belonged to any theatre company including ‘his acting company’ as the Chamberlain’s Men were managed and directed by the Burbadges, father James and his two sons Cuthbert and Richard all of whom owned both the Globe and Blackfriars.

“…professional life in London was marked by a number of financially advantageous arrangements that permitted him to share in the profits of his acting company, the Chamberlain’s Men, and its two theatres, the Globe and the Blackfriars.”

The four plays that bore the name before 1600 on Quartos are ‘Richard II’ ‘William Shake speare’ (1598). ‘Richard III’ ‘William Shake speare’ (1598). ‘Loues Labore Lost’ ‘augmented by Shakespeare’ (1598), ‘Henry IV, Part I’ ‘newly corrected by Shake-speare’.Alsobearing that name are the Quartos ‘Locrine’ ‘By W.S.’ (1595) - ‘Cromwell’ ‘By W.S.’ (1602 & 1613) - ‘The Puritan’ ‘By W.S.’ (1607) ‘London Prodigal’ ‘By William Shakespeare’ (1605) ‘A Yorkshire Tragedy’ ‘By W. Shakspeare’ [no ‘e’] in (Quarto 1 1608) and ‘By W. Shakespeare’ (Q2 1619).

“It is known that he risked losing royal favour only once, namely in 1599, when his company consented to perform ‘the play of the deposing and killing of Richard II’ at the instance of a group of conspirators against Queen Elizabeth who were led by her unsuccessful court favourite, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex.”

How many lines enthral or need report Of how their pompous base and lies are gone Of no worth or need for all the fuss. No known person from London ever visited Mr Shaxper in Stratford or called at his house before or after his death in 1616. No one had ever heard that the Author was claimed to be Mr Shaxper until someone read the poem by Leonard Digges in the 1632 Folio that contains the words, ‘thy Stratford moniment’ and with all if this attention to Stratford still no one went to Stratford to find a still living relative. No one went to Stratford to find any evidence of ‘Shakespeare’ until the middle of the 19th century.

On how many stages have these forgotten scenes been acted o’er In any state or form by actors of renown ?

The Earl of Southampton was by his second marriage, the stepfather of Leonard Digges who wrote the verse for the Folio. A lady named Cordell Annesley attempted to save her father from being declared insane by her two older sisters and this seems to be the model prototype for Cordelia in King Lear ‘Cordell to Cordelia’. Annesley married Sir William Harvey who had previously been married to the mother of the Earl of Southampton. This may demonstrate how few people there were in last two decades of Elizabeth’s reign but London never again had so many illustrious playwrights and poets. Books are still being written in the 21st century about ‘Shakespeare’. The Times Literary Supplement, London, often reviews the latest books regarding ‘Shakespeare’ occasionally four or five at a time as in the August 19 & 21 2005 edition that reviewed four on pages 6 to 8, another on page 8, five more on page 10 with another on page 11. In the essays there and in others of the ‘TLS’, excerpts still confirm that the old assumptions about ‘Shakespeare’ are still repeated indicating that they are still regarded as factual. From this 2005 edition, “We have a huge number of allusions … from fellow writers and others in the London theatre world who knew him [Shakespeare] well (Greene, Meres, Jonson, Heywood, Webster, Marston, Gabriel Harvey, Chettle, Weever, Dekker) an almost continuous series of references from 1592 to his death in 1616, all of which identify him as both actor and author.”None of these men ever claimed to have met or seen the Author of the Plays. There is but one reference to a ‘William Shakespeare’ as an actor, in the printed plays of Ben Jonson. William is listed as playing two roles in Jonson plays. There exists no information of why he is listed.“Jonson took issue with Shakespeare’s fellow actors (such as Heminge and Condell who edited the First ‘HemingeFolio).”andCondell’, members of the company of actors never ‘edited’ or took the manuscripts to the printer. John always spelled his name as ‘Heminges’. “…his patron Southampton.” “There is firm evidence that Southampton and Pembroke gave Shakespeare their patronage.” “with Shakespeare’s old patron the Earl of Southampton.” (TLS August 15. 2008)

Another member of the Society can see no sense in his fellow member’s taking so much time and trouble to find ‘insignificant’ though authentic information when he, himself, can and does write reams of biography of ‘Shakespeare’ describing afternoons at home with the Master as a young man reading from great books to his siblings, oblivious to the reality that the ‘home’ was a house on the back street of Stratford adjoining the father’s wool shop, and that the books described would be far too expensive for the humble house to contain.

He is only one of other forgers who try to establish that the Stratford man is the author Hamlet. In a ‘Stratford Edition Series’ an unnamed biographer writes of Shake speare: “Of his eminent countrymen Raleigh, Sidney, Bacon, Cecil, Walsingham, Coke, Camden, Hooker, Drake, Hobbes, Inigo Jones, Herbert of Cherbury, Laud, Pym, Hampden, Selden, Walton, Wooton and Donne may be properly reckoned as his contemporaries, and yet there is no evidence whatever that he was personally known to any of these men, or to any other of less note among the statesmen, scholars, soldiers and artists of his day, except a few of his fellow craftsmen…and he left no trace upon the political or even the social life of his era.”

This writer makes exception because he believes that two members of the acting company attested to knowing him, but no contemporary person left any statement saying that he knew the man personally or that they had seen him. The two members ‘Heminge and Condell’ whose names are printed under the Dedication in the Folio of Plays give only the impression there to know the man but this Dedication and the names are printed in the Second Folio of 1632 long after the two men had died. The text above the names ‘Heminge and Condell’ is not in the simple language of two unscholarly actors but, rather, it has all the appropriate phrasings of the playwright Ben Jonson who was still alive in 1632, but Ben Jonson never said that he knew the man or that he had met or had seen him nor did he ‘know’ who was ‘Shake speare’.

In the 400 years since ‘Shake speare’, nothing is known to have been burned or otherwise destroyed that could have given authenticity to the identity of the playwright. When the Folio is first printed, all of the ‘original’ plays are in front of the printer at his shop, yet not one of these manuscripts still exists and there is no information as to what became of any one of them.

No one in 400 years has discovered any document or sheet of paper with the man’s writing on it, except for a half dozen scrawls that are his signatures, indecipherable as to the exact spelling. A third member of the Society, the youngest member yet elected President of the group, goes much farther in finding information about ‘Shakespeare’.

The acting company was owned and operated only by the three Burbadges, the father and his two sons, and they spelled their name in this manner with a ‘d’.

“Father John Gerard, who seems never to have met Shakespeare.” He nor anyone had.

Having access to books of the time in a respected library, because of his honoured position, he finds references that shed light upon the Master which are welcomed by all London but these are later found to be masterful forgings that he has inserted between the lines and in margins.

Around 1850 the Shakespeare Society of London is formed and of the four charter members, only one went to Stratford to search through the official records of the town for information concerning one ‘William Shakespeare’. He found the most mundane facts of when he was born, when married, when buried and in which church. He also found that no member of the family was actually called ‘Shakespeare’ but ‘Shaxper’ or ‘Shacksper’. A great amount of information is found concerning the man’s son in law, a well known physician, who had a great library of books and papers which are willed in turn to his son in law. ‘Shaxper’, who is thought to have been the great playwright, leaves no books or papers as there were none.

Such valuable papers would be presumed to be stored at a University as many other documents of the time have been kept but not the Plays. There is no original with which to compare the wording or if the Folio represents the Original text, no original manuscripts to compare penmanship from one play to another, or from one section of a play to another section of the same play. All possible original writing and any and all revisions are destroyed. There is no method through the penmanship of manuscripts of knowing who wrote any line. This must have been deliberately intended. It makes it impossible to identify the author by penmanship and thus to render it impossible at the time or since to identify the Author.

Read and note these ‘repetitions’. Yes, you will identify the similarity of ‘Commend’ and ‘condemn’ but there are claimed to be several identical ‘sounds’ as well as words.

Read the following text and find what is now the distinguishing trait of the late pen of ‘William’ that proves that the entire ‘Winter’s Tale’ must be of the lateness in the writing because of “Florizel’s celebratory confession …has a similar complexity and repetition. By use of such parallels, we identify the distinctive features of Shakespeare’s late style”.

In an article in the Times Literary Supplement, May 23, 2008, the reviewer, Bart Van Es, states:“Nineteenth century philologists had demonstrated that unstressed line endings grew progressively more common over the course of Shakespeare’s career. Works such as Pericles which Dryden had believed to be an early work, were re-dated using this technique and recognized as part of a late cluster of tragicomedies including Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.”Thesethree titles are now being considered plays written much later than Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello. Do those who have read or witnessed performances of these six plays consider the late three as admirable as the earlier three ? Those who are familiar with the ‘early three’ are asked to read one of the ‘late three’ to ascertain whether any of the ‘late three’ even hold their interest long enough to read one entirely.

Desperation has sent researchers into anxious ‘tests’ of the lines in many plays, seeking tell tale evidence of any reason to stamp ‘proven’ to their methods of finding a perfect way to identify not only a play but a verse, or a single line that stamps the phrase as being one that can only be from the unmatched hand of this greatest of all English poets whom no one has ever identified as a living person. Not only are linguists and philologists seeking the magic method of determining the plays written by that one hand but are professing to distinguish which work is ‘early’ and which is ‘late’ ‘Shakespearian’ by a different use of words and now by the use of repetitive word sounds.

The TLS article informs the reader that in the Independence Review of August 1904, “Lytton Strachy described Shakespeare in his later years as more bored than wise.” Strachy is quoted as saying, “Bored with people, bored with real life, bored with drama, in fact, with anything except poetical dreams”.

The TLS article is a review of a book that forwards the premise that “the combination of elision, rapidly abandoned metaphor and verbal echo is a pervasive quality of this and other late plays”.An example is stated to prove the point, 10 lines from the 20th page of the 30 page play, ‘The Winter’s Tale’.

Polixenes is ‘King of Bohemia’, Florizel is ‘his Son’.

Clown does not enter until Act iv Scene ii to say: “Let me see: every ’leven wether tods; every tod yields pound and odd shilling; fifteen hundred shorn, what comes the wool to ? I cannot do’t without counters. Let me see, what am I to buy for our sheep shearing feast ? Three pound of sugar; five pound of currants; rice what will this sister of mine do with rice ? But my father hath made her mistress of the feast, and she lays itHison.”conversation seems peasant enough but he does use the word ‘hath’ but twice in the entire scene and ‘hast’ twice and ‘thee’ twice’ in the entire two column scene with only one other, Autolycus, a Rogue. In Act iv Scene iii, Clown says: “Believe me, thou talkest of an admirable conceited fellow. Has he any unbraided wares ?”

There is a fourth ‘repetitious sound’, the sound of ‘er’ in ‘her’. The article counts 7 ‘er’s as in ‘her’ missing again the ‘er’ sound in ‘earth, but includes the repetition of the word ‘were’ where the ‘er’ is not pronounced as ‘er’ in ‘her’ but as in ‘air’.

Looking further back, follow the conversation of ‘Clown’ who is the son of Old Shepherd. One would surmise that in speaking this shepherd’s son would phrase his words differently than do those of the Monarchy revealing a far different vocabulary. All of Clown’s words are in ‘blank verse’, not invented by the young Christopher Marlowe but greatly developed by him.

“Polixenes: And this my neighbor, too ? “Florizel: And he, and more Than he, and men, the earth, the heavens, and all: That, - were I crown’d the most imperial monarch, Thereof most worthy; were I the fairest youth That ever made eye swerve; had force and knowledge More than was every man’s, I would prize them Without her love: for her employ them all; Commend them, and condemn them, to her service, Or to their own perdition.” Did you catch the letters and sound of ‘or’ 4 times, the word ‘and’ 4 times, the letters, ‘th’ 19 times ?

Thee printed excerpts in the article missed the ‘th’ in ‘earth’.

This is an example of the extent that some Shakespearophiles in the present will go to build the whimsy of William’s writings as always deliberate as he intended, “as he conceived them”. Reading the entire ‘Winter’s Tale’ should reveal many other ‘elisions’, the ‘omission of a vowel or syllable (crown’d), repeated vowel sounds and repeated words as ‘and’ !

Why has the Master Poet written these ‘thee’, ‘thou’, ‘hath’ and ‘hast’ words for Clown and then allowed him then to say, ‘Has he any wares” instead of ‘Hath he…”.

This excerpt that caught the eye of this author of ‘Shakespeare’s Late Style’ is less than one quarter of one column and the 140 columns of the play as availably printed. The reader’s eye may glance to the left hand page and notice in the first column where it reads: “Mop: He hath paid you all he promised you: May be he has paid you more, which will shame you to give him again.” Find any ‘same sounds’ or ‘repeated words’ ? Three ‘he’, four ‘you’ in three lines. So ?

“Clown: Is there no manners left among maids ?”

In this ‘Guide through the Fantasies’ of One who is Revered as the Greatest Dramatic Poet in English History, the name, ‘William Shakespeare’ refers to the name printed on the eight original Quartos and the later Folios. Herein ‘William’ refers to the person whom the biographers from 1660 to the present regard as both the Man from Stratford and the Author of the 36 Plays of the Folio, and ‘William Shaxper’ refers to the authentic person who was born at Stratford on April 23, 1552 and died upon his 52nd birthday. He is known by the Stratford Town records as living on Henley Street and then at the ‘New House’ on High Street. From this authentic man of Stratford there is not one sheet of paper with any words written by his hand.

How hast owre Master poet not allow’d Clown to sound the proper verb “are there no manners” as Clown is never found to speak in incorrect grammar before, when he said: “If I were not in love with Mopsa. . .”

PRINTING AND PIRATING Robert J. Meyer

Aliston Plowden continues by saying P165, “It was the responsibility of the publisher of any new work to get the manuscript approved and licensed by the Privy Council before entering it at Stationers’ Hall. He might be the printer himself but if not, he would then contract for the printing to be done. It was officially stipulated that: ‘No manner of person’ was permitted to print ‘any manner of book or paper of that sort, nature, or in what language soever’ without a licence in writing from Her Majesty, by six members of the Privy Council, by the Archbishop of Canterbury and York of the Chancellors of the two Universities. The Stationers’ Company, incorporated in 1557, controlled the printing and publishing which, like so many other things, were centred in London and severe penalties were enforced against those who imported books from abroad or operated secret of unlicensed presses.”

Since both the Privy Council and the ‘Stationers’ Company’ had stringent rules that all material for printing had to go through two groups before publishing, how could a publisher or printer bring a manuscript to the ‘Stationers Hall’ without proving his rightful authority to have the work in his hands, that it was not a scrivener’s copy or a set of verses that he had purloined without the author’s knowledge or consent ? Since these rules were in force, how could all Quartos of the Plays be called later “stolen and surreptitious copies maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious imposters that exposed them” ? Where stand the arguments by so many 20th century biographers that the Quartos differed from the Folio because the Quartos were the results of poor memories of some of the actors or of the poor work of scriveners sitting in the theatres ready to sell these imperfect dictations to printers ? These now exposed as fraud arguments are invented to continue the idea that the Quartos were mangled versions that the Folio later presented for the first time exactly as “he”, the true author, “conceived them”. It was not until after the printing of the Folio in 1623 that the legend was formed that ‘he’ was a man named ‘William Shaxper’ who had lived his life in Stratford before his death 16 years before in 1616.Plowden also says P165, “Some printers employed literate men as editors or readers but usually an author saw his own book through the press, reading the proofs and having the type corrected on the spot.”: Why, then, are there so many dozens of ‘errors’ in the Quartos if the publisher, be he the author or not, proof read and had the ‘type corrected on the spot’ ? Another author sees the reason for so many errors as the publisher being the author himself, ‘correcting the work at the last moment’ which is the totally opposite opinion.

In ‘Elizabethan England’ by Aliston Plowden (with forward by A.L. Rowse) P164: “Books and verses often circulated in manuscript for several years before they were published. Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ was written between 1580 and 1593 but was not printed until 1890. Scriveners were employed to make copies which would be handed round among the author’s friends and a good deal of pirating went on”. That there is a period of years between the writing and the printing of a work does not imply or offer evidence that manuscripts were circulated during those many years. Naturally a poet’s personal friends may have access to read his work, but to pay scriveners to make copies seems a very expensive endeavour when, as today, it would be cheaper to make one’s own copies even in longhand. The phrase, ‘handed round among the author’s friends’ sounds too much like Meres’ phrase ‘among his private friends’ relating to the ‘Sonnets’ that ‘W. S.’ was supposed to be ‘handed round’. In this ‘handing around’, why would a ‘good deal of pirating’ go on ? Does this imply that ‘the author’s friends’ were selling copies entrusted to them ? If it is meant that printers ‘pirated’ manuscripts in this way to publish without permission, why would anyone pay scriveners to make copies if this led to the possibility for ‘a good deal of pirating ?

It is in the contents of the works attributed to ‘W. S.’ or those in such Quartos that are at odds with the contents of the versions in the First Folio that these references to ‘pirating’ are noted, as rarely if ever are such arguments made about the contemporary works of the other poets and playwrights. If the Quarto versions were ‘pirated’, they had to contain the words that were known to be spoken on stage as Simon Forman’s reporting also differs with the Folio version of ‘Macbeth’. If someone, without permission, had these Quartos printed, why would they give credit to the ‘genuine’ author and risk the wrath of that person and be in judgement by the Privy Council ? If they were published legally in accordance with the rules of the Privy Council through the Stationers’ Hall, which they must have been, why did they not recognize the ‘author’ by printing his name on all Quartos rather than omitting it on most and placing the name in various forms and in various places in the published Quartos ? Why did they choose a name in these few instances that had no relevance to any known person in London and was never referred to in any manner other than with these eight Quarto plays and two poems throughout the entire period until the 1623 Folio that contained plays not published before in Quartos and plays never before attributed to anyone ?

Once he came to the throne of England, King James I released the Earl of Southampton from out of the Tower, a symbol of his pardoning of the Earl’s best friend, the beheaded Earl of Essex, and he immediately replaced Ralegh into the Tower of London as if to reverse the edicts and purpose of Elizabeth who had severed King James’ mother from him and then finally his mother from her head. In August of the year of his ascension, 1603, James sent a velvet pall to cover the Peterborough grave of his mother Mary. In 1606, he commissioned Nicholas Cure to carve a magnificent monument of white marble in Westminster and when the son, William Cure, finished the work in 1612, Mary’s lead coffin was transported to Westminster and to an underground room, again as a triumph over Elizabeth by elevating for posterity to behold the woman she had taken from James when he was a needful infant. How far did James go in immortalizing that which had some private meaning for him and for those very few for whom he held respect ?

The two poems appeared fully developed with the ‘Dedication’ over the name that had never been known in any form or spelling as having written poetry or as having any history whatever. Since the ‘Sonnets’ are believed to have been written as early as 1591, they, too, were written before the name ‘Shakespeare’ was known.

The ‘Sonnets’ published under the name ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, and not ‘Sonnets written by William Shake speare’, were purportedly written and known before 1591 according to some later ‘historians’ but they were not printed until 1609, six years into the reign of James I. These ‘Sonnets’, in which scholars have searched to find connections between the author and the very young Earl of Southampton although there is no positive identification for such a relationship, have always been a literary mystery. These ‘Sonnets’ and the two poems, ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, are the only poems that have been credited to ‘Shakes-speare’ other than the eventually claimed short poems, “The Passionate Pilgrim’, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’, and ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ printed much later in a collection of poems by others. Both ‘Venus’ and ‘Lucrece’ were long poems, the first appearing in print in 1593, the year in which Christopher Marlowe disappeared, the second in 1594. The ‘Dedication’ in the first, promising a second the following year, was to the Earl of Southampton who was a follower of the Earl of Essex whom King James would pardon ten years later, and this Dedication that claimed the poem to be “the first heir of my invention” was over the name ‘William Shakespeare’, the first time that the name had appeared anywhere in literature or anywhere else.

The mystery of how two long poems on subjects of the ancients could appear credited to a name that was hitherto unknown is now being given the ‘explanation’ by biographers that William of Stratford brought them with him when he came to London, but this easy explanation is stated only since the mid nineteenth century but no one has uncovered any evidence that this William had ever written anything before and no Stratford resident had stated that he was a poet or that he could write anything including his name. The ‘explanation’ has only deepened the mystery of how poetry that needed source books and research could appear without evidence of prior experience. The title page of ‘Venus’ does not credit anyone as author.

The inserted Dedication page alone contains the name that takes credit for the writing and includes the claim that the poem is the ‘first heir of my invention’ which attempts to ‘introduce’ a ‘new author’ but explains nothing as to how this is possible. No one questioned it. It is accepted as factual because it is printed in the book as if this would be the only book that was mis credited on the cover. When the second poem was published the following year, both poems were sold ‘at the sign of the greyhound’ in London and both were on similar romantic topics

THE PRINTING OF THE FOLIO 1623 Robert J. Meyer

Biographers often mention the comments of the ‘Return from Parnassus’ as evidence of how ‘popular’, how ‘well known’ was ‘Shakespeare’ but the play is a parody and any comments on the two poems ceased quickly. The Quartos that contained the name ‘Shake speare’ in various spellings when printed created no comment and no one was sufficiently interested to enquire any information about the identity of the author.

The appetite for voluptuous Venus and luscious Lucrece was soon satiated, all references were recorded by 1600. After that all laudations ceased except that the name was still associated with over sweetness only, when, in 1601, the Cambridge Play, ‘The Return from Parnassus’, parodied the fad for nectarous Adonis. Yet, some modern biographers present the lines given to the characters in the play as genuine events and opinions of the time, and that young University students had actually placed copies of the book under their pillows at night so enamoured were they of the sugar sweet words of ‘Shakespeare’. None of the biographers point out that the very title of the play was appropriate to the parody. ‘Parnassus’, as used in the compilation of fine English literature, ‘England’s Parnassus’, published the year before, meant England’s Mount Parnassus, the sacred mountain of Apollo and the Muses, the domain of poetry and literature. The Cambridge boys lampooning those current literary fashions in poems so overdone that made them, the judicious, grieve, that they sought to make the skilful laugh with their play titled, ‘The return from Parnassus’, or the retreat away from the sacred, now saccharine, Muse of Poetry.

If Ben Jonson had been informed that William of Stratford was the author of the Folio play, it would be assumed that Jonson would have been, if not surprised, at least intensely interested to know more about the man regardless of his feelings about the plays, and at the very least, he would have travelled, probably by walking, to Stratford to talk to the man’s relatives, to have examined the man’s library, and to have written about this endeavour as he had about almost everything that he had witnessed or examined, but Jonson does nothing and says nothing about the author either before the printing of the Folio or ever again.

“Shakespeare thou, whose honey flowing vein” Richard Barnfield, 1598.

“His sugared Sonnets” Francis Meres, 1598.

“Sweet Shakespeare” William Clerke, 1595.

The Cambridge parody play made no reference to any play as being the product of this ‘Shakespeare’ nor does it make any further reference to ‘Shakespeare’ as it does by naming Ben Jonson as ‘the wittiest fellow of a brick-layer in England’. Comments of the two poems ceased in 1601 and the Cambridge play was the end of any literary or essay reference to ‘Shakespeare’ until 22 years later in the Folio.

“Meliferous and honey tongued Shakespeare” Meres, 1598. “Honie-tongued Shakespeare” - John Weever, 1599.

In Francis Meres’ 1598 comment, “the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in meliferous and honey tongued Shakespeare’, he is speaking specifically about the poems: “as witness his Venus, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets”. After that he merely lists the plays that he has found in other sources credited to that name, prefacing them with ‘excellent’ but he says as much about all English writers.

The first poem created a flurry of interest in its content and a demand for reprints, more for ‘Venus’ than for ‘Lucrece’, and the novelty of ‘Venus’ overshadowed any curiosity about the author. The audacious manner of the writing was both bold and new, and the name of the author was new, and so both the name and the syrupy content of these poems became synonymous. The over sweet style of the poems clung to the name of the ‘author’ and references to the ‘author’ carried the saccharine synonyms of sweetness with several books written some years later.

“But who is the author of these sonnets, Sir ? “ “That, I’m afraid, shall remain undisclosed. Incognito, shall we say ?”

“What is your usual procedure in such an incident ?”

It may be assumed, then, that Jonson was never informed as to who wrote the plays when asked to write a commendatory verse for the Folio, but that the circumstances were such that the matter was to rest without further comment or inquiry. The ‘Sonnets’ were published in the sixth year of the reign of James I. It is not known if these were the same ‘sonnets’ mentioned by Meres in 1598, nor is it known how widely Meres’ book was known in 1609, but Meres mentioned ‘Shakespeare’, ‘his sugared sonnets’ and a 1609 printing was titled ‘Shakespeares Sonnets’. Biographers of the 19th and 20th centuries have given wide latitude in their estimates of the times that these sonnets were written. Critics have placed the dates variously from 1591 to 1608 based upon their attempts to find references in the stanzas to the life of the Earl of Southampton chosen on the basis of his being named in the Dedication of ‘Venus and Adonis’. All manner of conjecture has been presented to link William of Stratford, to whom no one referred during his lifetime, to the Earl who would have been very young and in school in 1591 2 when the earliest association was imagined. No one knows when these sonnets were written, they may have been written long before 1591, and it is not known in whose possession they were kept, Shakespeare’s ? Who is he in 1591? It may be said with equal validity that they were in the possession of James I since he ‘knew’ the author of the sonnets, and that James wished to see them in print to further his private revenge, that he appointed ‘Mr. W.H.’ to conduct them safely into the hands of the publisher, ‘T.T’, Thomas Thorpe, who would supervise their time at the shop of the printer, G. Eld. ‘Mr W.H.’ is not considered to be William Herbert as the Earl of Pembroke would not be properly addressed as ‘Mr’, but since this would be a clandestine transferral by the most trusted figure at the Court of King James and who would be named Chamberlain of the Royal Household in 1615, he could have introduced himself under any name or none at all. Thomas Thorpe, the publisher, was not addressing the Earl of Pembroke in the Dedication but only thanking the unostentatious but kindly courier in a little book of sonnets.

“What would you call these ‘Shakespeare Sonnets’ then ?”

“We shall not place the name upon the title page, then ?”

“His discretion is most respected, of course, but shall we, then, leave them anonymous ? A name does give them a more reputable appearance, Sir.”

“Most carefully, Sir, and with the greatest discretion, Sir, the greatest.”

“I wish you well, Sir, in your adventures.” “Then a good day to you, Master Thorpe.”

“Written by Shakespeare, then ?”

“What you will. I trust that you will guard them carefully, then ?”

“Oh, we need not put down that they were actually written by ‘Shakespeare’.”

“My superior was most adamant in that regard.”

“Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Sir.” “Excellent choice !” “And I’ll have George put in a little hyphen or an asterisk between ‘Shake’ and ‘speare’. That should add some style to it, very dignified, Sir.”

“The name ‘Shakespeare’ has been loosely used on the occasional play in Quarto, Sir, and on some anonymous poems as well. There are several ‘Shakespeare’ poems.”

“And to you, Master . . uh .” “W.H.”

“Very well, I shall myself be travelling a time, business endeavours, exploration, ships and trade, busy, very.”

As well as the publication of these ‘Sonnets’, the First Folio was also printed during the reign of James I, two years before the end of it. These plays had been known and produced on stage occasionally for up to 32 years, some never printed before in any form. Were they all published upon the urgency of James I ?

This ‘Authorized’ or ‘King James Version’ was completed in 1611. What was James’ purpose in commissioning the work, that could have been undertaken by the Church of England, that through Elizabeth seemed to be the cause for his mother’s imprisonment ?

Within one year of coming to the throne in London, King James the Sixth of Scotland, now James I of England, convoked the Hampton Court Conference at which he authorized a new translation of the Bible into English from Greek and Hebrew texts and some earlier English translations, setting 54 theologians and scholars to work on revising the Bishop’s version

James was foremost a scholar and a poet, whatever his ability, and he appreciated the work of other scholars and writers. He was an avid audience for theatrical presentations, always commanding performances of plays, far more than Elizabeth ever had, and he instituted regular presentations of Court Masques. One of his first official acts in 1603 was to take the Burbadge players under his own patronage, the first Royal to be the patron of a theatrical company. He created the pensioned office of Poet Laureate giving Ben Jonson that honourable duty as well as assigning him as creator of the Royal masques with Inigo Jones as architect.

Jonson’s London printer was William Stansby and the volume that he produced was magnificent with the title page illustrated with the figures of Comedy and Tragedy standing on either side of the impressive title, ‘The Works of Benjamin Jonson’. Ben placed nine of his plays in the first section remembering his Westminster teacher, William Camden, in the Dedication of the first play, ‘Every Man in his Humour’, and the Dedication of the last, ‘Catiline’, was to the Earl of Pembroke. This was in 1616. Again, who is the most likely person to have dedicated to this same Earl of Pembroke the Folio of 1632 when ‘Heminge and Condell’, whose names were on the Dedication, were both deceased ?

As much as James honoured his mother, Mary, he did not have her influence over him in his formative years and James grew to be a product of his environment without her. He was his own man and made that known to all who were around him, as he did not waver in his opinions but was positive and prompt at taking action on his decisions. James was the one Prince in the century equipped with the motivation and the resolve to command a new and final version of the Bible. This would be the definite symbol of his ending religious strife in his realm that had been the shadowing mark of the Elizabethan Age. While he was a young king in Scotland, James’ reputation as a supporter of the literary arts preceded him into England. Christopher Marlowe had expressed to his friends his desire to go to Edinburgh where he was confident that he would receive a more sympathetic reception for his plays at the Court of James in Scotland.

If, as James the First of England, James was in the unique position of knowing not only the name of the true author of these several Plays, but he also knew the author Jonson personally as well as the author’s friends, his royal position and his resolve would have engineered the permanent preservation of those plays in a form of publication that was almost unprecedented, a complete Folio, and he had all the means at his immediate disposal to do so. Only one man in all England had attempted, and successfully, the unheard of task of publishing an entire set of plays by one dramatist and that man was James’ created Poet Laureate, Ben Jonson, who had produced the first ever published collection of plays, his own, in the large Folio form.

In 1616, English drama lost one of it titans, the dramatist and friend of Jonson, “What times they had at the Mermaid”. Francis Beaumont died at the age of 32 after writing verses for Ben’s Folio and he was buried in March in a corner of Westminster Abbey near by Chaucer and Spenser.Inthe following month of April, there died, quite unheralded by any noble Lord and unsung by any poet in verse of praise, one who had penned no verse and who had difficulty in writing his own name but a name that was raised to be that of ‘the greatest artisan of all English literature’ and exalted to the world’s stage when, seven years later, not his name but a proximity to his name was crowned by Ben Jonson as the ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’.

Ben’s most famous and early play, ‘Every Man in his Humour’, he completely rewrote to come closer to Cicero’s edict for Comedy, ‘a copy of life, a mirror of custom, a representation of truth’. He painstakingly poured over every page and corrected even his own past errors that his recent research had revealed.

It would be complete conjecture to suggest by whom any of these poems or plays may have been written. However, the known circumstances may indicate a more logical solution to the question that is raised by the generally accepted view of historians that William of Stratford carried the completed ‘Sonnets’ in his pocket when first coming to London when no one ever associated him with any written work until seven years after his death.

The names of a few contemporaries have been forwarded as being the ‘true’ author of these Poems and Plays. Delia Bacon brought her case for Francis Bacon to Thomas Carlyle in 1857, the year that she had published her ‘Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded’ in which she “advanced the theory that the plays were written by Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh and FrancisUnlikeBacon”.the works of other dramatists of the period, the Folio Plays are mostly from the same sources on similar subjects, historical figures from Ancient Greek and Roman times, Kings of Britain, and stories with their locales in Italy and France. There is only one if any of pure invention, unlike those of Marston or Jonson, none is on contemporary times. That three writers would independently write plays on these single themes is highly unlikely. Ralegh and Bacon were heavily engaged in governmental and other duties and both had written sizeable amounts of published works and had no reason to write anything without acknowledgement, nor had Spenser.One argument in support of the contention that the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere (1540 1604), wrote the plays is that the Earl had written poetry as a young man and published it signifying that he was known publicly as a poet. His poems were printed in the small collection, ‘Phoenix West’ in 1593 and ‘England’s Helicon” and ‘England’s Parnassus’ both of 1600. The reason given that he did not use his name on the plays is that ‘play writing’ was not considered a worthy vocation for a member of the nobility.

With less care, given less time, he included his Masques but also inserted his beloved poems including “the ripest of my studies”, his Epigrams that he also dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke. Among the poems were ‘Have you seen but a bright lily grow’ and the verse that he rewrote from the original ‘Drink to me, Celia, with thine eyes and I’ll pledge thee with mine’.

The year 1616 was a special year for English literature as it also saw the Folio edition of the collected prose of King James in his ‘The Works of the Most high and Mighty Prince James’. His father, Henry Stuart, had translated Valerius Maximus into English and Mary Stuart had written at least one book of poems in French, but were there more sonnets ?

The bluntness of some subjects and language in the plays may have been an embarrassment to a writer that was of the clergy but the profligate Oxford would never have suffered such embarrassment nor would he have not cared a fig for sniggering varlets scoffing at Court and equally improbable is that any of his peers would have dared to whisper or point fingers behind the back of volatile de Vere. This ‘explanation’ of a member of the nobility not wanting to be embarrassed by writing plays was invented by critics in later centuries, particularly in the 20th, specifically to support their contention that de Vere was ‘the Author’ This reason dissolves, however, when it was later discovered that de Vere did write some comedies not extant.

None of the nobility, not Oxford or Pembroke or any of those who had been immersed in the necessary classics at university, need have hesitated to use his own name because of rank and should the most lily-livered among them have used a pen-name, nothing would prevent him from willing his plays to posthumous publication, thereby admitting to them.

The tenor of the times changed rapidly during the first thirty years of English drama and if there were any closet writer, the door would soon open and the manuscripts in the bottom drawer would be put into the press for the whole country to know that the Lord of high esteem would be immortalized on the stages of the world. In 1616, the Bishop who had supervised the printing of King James’ works of prose had proclaimed, “it was neither unlawful nor incorrect for a King to write”.The pen name, ‘Shakespeare’, for a pen name it apparently was, must have remained unidentified for a better reason that was known at least to some of those involved with the printing of the Folio. The printer for the Folio of 1623 would not be Jonson’s William Stansby, the edition would not be as elaborate as Jonson’s, and the plays would not see the printing press of Richard Field. It was 30 years since he had printed ‘Venus and Adonis’ and Field, who had attended the same free school as William at Stratford, had by this time risen to be the Master of the Printers’ Guild. The eventual printers would be the experienced Jaggard brothers. William Jaggard had printed the collection of poems, ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ in 1599 and again in 1612. The publisher would be Edward Blount, the well respected publisher who had supervised the printing of the plays of Christopher Marlowe more than 30 years before.

The ‘bad’ quartos mentioned, the ‘garbled’ versions, are not called so to imply that words are changed or that they have misspellings as from a published reprint of a ‘garbled’ page of ‘Hamlet’, it is seen that the wording is different but with no printing errors, or misspellings or omitted words. The text is quite readable and quite beautiful. Since this version came first it is not a ‘paraphrase’ of the Folio version but the Folio version is the paraphrased version. Hamlet says, “That’s the point” not ‘There’s the rub’. Unless the reader knows the Folio version by memory, it is some time before the reader can tell that it is not the Folio version.

The title page of ‘Loues Labore Lost’ reads: “Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere” and this cannot refer to ‘newl y corrected’ from a previous quarto. If there were a missing first quarto before this, which no one knows about, this title page does not indicate that either quarto was originally written by ‘W. Shakespere’.

THE PRINTINGS OF WILLIAM JAGGARD 1598 Robert J. Meyer

The first time that the name of ‘W.S.’ appeared on the title page of a play occurred in 1598 when ‘Loues Labore Lost’ was published. On the title page were the words: “A PLEASANT Conceited Comedie CALLED Loues Labore Lost. As it was presented before her Highnes this Last Christmas. Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere. Imprinted at London by W. W. for Cuthbert Burby. 1598” ‘W. W.” was William White. Before 1598, several of the Plays had been published in quartos. There were editions of ‘Henry VI Part II’ and ‘Henry VI Part III’. Biographers have called these editions ‘garbled’ and/or ‘pirated’. There was an edition of ‘Titus Andronicus’ that has been called ‘good’ rather than ‘garbled’ and they appeared by 1596. In 1597, quartos appeared of ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘pirated bad’, and of ‘Richard II’ reprinted in 1598 and ‘Richard III’, both ‘authorized’. ‘Richard III’ was reprinted in 1598 and ‘Richard II’ was reissued twice. In 1598, ‘I Henry IV’ was published early in the year. No author’s name appeared on any of these printings. F. E. Halliday in his ‘Life of Shakespeare’ 1961 states that the two Henry VI’s and Titus appeared before 1598, otherwise other biographers say that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men sent four plays to the publishers in 1597 and 1598, ‘Richard II’, ‘Richard III’, ‘I Henry IV’ and ‘Loues Labore Lost’. The reason that most biographers give for the absence of a name on these quartos is that “publishers rarely bothered to print the names of authors on such unconsidered trifles as plays”. Again there are always excuses for the lack of evidence when William is concerned but they rely on the innocence of their readers as the identity of authorship on plays was prevalent from the beginning of English plays. The long list goes back to the ‘first’ serious plays, ‘Gorbaduc’ that is very specific on the title page of 1561. ‘The Tragedie of Gorbadvc, whereof three Actes were written by Thomas Nortone and the two laste by Thomas Sackuyle’. This play was written before the birth of Christopher Marlowe. The first comedy written in English, ‘Ralph Roister Doister’ was authored by Nicholas Udall, headmaster of Eton around 1550. Reprints of the title pages show them to be by named playwrights before 1593 including Marlowe’s ‘Dr Faustus’.

The following year, 1599, William Jaggard published a small book containing 21 poems, one being ‘Come live with me’ by Marlowe. Jaggard printed the poems under the title of “The Passionate Pilgrime: By W. Shakespere”. Again, the biographers ‘know’ Jaggard’s motivation in crediting all of the poems in ‘Passionate Pilgrim’ to the one name. Why, Jaggard knew very well that the name would sell the book since it was a guarantee of quality and since the public would instantly recognize the name to be that of the author who had ‘written’, nay, ‘corrected and augmented’ ‘Loues Labore Lost’ now that the book has been in the bookshops for an entire year and since the public would be most interested in poems by the one who whetted their appetite by deftly ‘correcting and augmenting’ that play.

When Valentine Simmes printed “Richard II’, he made 69 ‘errors’ in his second edition and he corrected 14 of these ‘errors’ but added 123 new ‘errors’. ‘Errors’ cannot mean misspellings as the ‘Hamlet’ first quarto shows there are many substitutions of words and phrases on each page. Regarding the printing of ‘Loue’s Labore Lost’ with the lines “newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere”, the reason now given by biographers for printing and crediting the authorship to such ‘unconsidered trifles as plays’ was that the “name was now a guarantee of quality, enough in itself to sell a book”. The name was on only two ‘popular’ poems, ‘Venus’ and ‘Lucrece’ but fully 18 the plays were published in quarto until 1623 without any author’s name. Why was not his established ‘popularity guaranteed to sell a book’ sufficient to publish plays before 1598 under that name and why were only 8 plays published with that name in quartos before 1623 ?

The name on ‘Loue’s Labore Lost’ and on ‘The Passionate Pilgrime’ spelled ‘Shakespere’ and not the Folio’s ‘Shakespeare’. Who wrote this ‘garbled ‘version of Hamlet, who corrects and augments, during the time of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men ? When and if the Lord Chamberlain’s Men sent a play to a printer, it would be the original or a correct copy of the original and the proof reader need not be the author. Christopher Marlowe, it is known, did oversee the printing of his ‘Tamburlaines’ and his ‘Dr Faustus, adding new lines to the printed version that was written after the time of the first performances. Marlowe had his own publisher, Blount. In the instance of ‘Loue’s Labore Lost’, the publisher was ‘Cuthbert Burby’ as Cuthbert Burbadge was listed on the title page.

Jaggard credited the 21 poems to ‘W. Shakespere’ exactly as he had seen the name on ‘Loues Labore Lost’. Jaggard had taken out of that play three poems and could say were he asked, that he reasoned that this was the name of the author of the poems since that was the name on the play from which they came. If Jaggard were interested in cashing in on the popularity of a best selling author, he would have been wise to copy the name that was on the popular ‘Venus and Adonis’ since this, too, was a collection of verse, but he did not copy the name. He used the name on ‘Loues Labore Lost’ that was ‘W. Shakespere’ and that is not the same as the name on ‘Venus’ which was ‘William Shakespeare’.

Author A. L. Rowse says (1963 P456), “As early as 1598 99 Jaggard had put out a small book of verses, “The Passionate Pilgrim’ which included five poems only of Shakespeare’s and had put his name on the title page. Thomas Heywood tells us of Shakespeare’s displeasure at this: ‘So the author I know was much offended with Master Jaggard that, altogether unknown to him, presumed to make so bold with his name’. In this year the publisher William Jaggard sought to recommend a miscellaneous volume he had put out, ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’, as ‘By W. Shakespeare’. Jaggard had got hold of a couple of Dark Lady sonnets and added three more from ‘Loues Labore Lost’, to help make the book sell. The 1612 version has two recently published poems by Thomas Heywood. To this edition Heywood is said to have complained since Jaggard once more credited the entire sonnets to ‘W. Shakespeare’. Heywood’s protest was that it insinuated that it was Heywood who had stolen poems from ‘W. Shakespere’.”. F, E. Halliday says of this: “this looked, wrote Heywood, as though he had stolen them from Shakespeare, who, ‘to do himself right, had published them under his own name.” Neither biographer says exactly when Heywood made these remarks. To which printing, the 1599 or the 1612, did Heywood refer with ‘the author I know much offended with Master Jaggard ?’ Rowse implies the 1599 version, but Heywood was upset with the 1612 version in which his own two poems were included without credit to him and he would not know about the 1609 publication of the Sonnets before that time. Heywood is ‘much offended’ about his own unaccredited poems and he cannot ‘know’ about ‘W.S.’ in any manner

Rowse, in 1963, printed the texts to three of the sonnets in ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ and says, “A third sonnet” and thereby demonstrates that these are not the ‘Sonnets’ of 1609, but suggests that they “must be from among the ‘sugared sonnets’” and that “it is unlikely that the more intimate sonnets written to Southampton were “handed round among his private friends’”. So now the ‘Sonnets’ of the 1609 printing are most unlikely to be the sonnets that Meres credits as of ‘Shakespeare’s’ in 1598. Meres only imagines these ‘Sonnets’ to be ‘among his private friends’. He obviously knows nothing of the author personally. Yet, in 1973, Rowse says, “Jaggard got hold of a couple of Dark Lady sonnets” although he had quoted them as not the ones from the ‘Sonnets’ of 1609 which included the ‘Dark Lady’ sonnets.Since Heywood was referring to the 1612 edition when he said, “so the author I know much offended with Master Jaggard, that, altogether unknown to him, presumed to make so bold with his name”, why would the ‘author’ object to the 1612 edition and not to the 1599 edition thirteen years before ? This question is never raised; instead, the statement of Heywood is used directly after mentioning the 1599 edition, not the 1612 edition. In all of the references to Heywood’s words, Heywood never says who the ‘author’ is but only that he was offended. The juxtaposed quotations are arranged to lead the reader to believe that the offended ‘author’ expressed this in 1599 which is not so and that there was an objection which would have been the only time that an objection had been made about the printing of anything that was credited to that name, regardless of who wrote it.

“By the exercise of his qualitye, industry and good behaviour, he that be come possessed of the Black Fryers playhouse, which hath been employed for playes sithence it was builded by his father, now nere 50 yeres agone.”

‘His Father’, James Burbadge, never built the Blackfriars as the building originally was part of the Black Fryers Priory. The author apologises for the writer, ‘H.S.’, in a footnote.

The purpose of the letter’s contents is to plead for assistance from “My very Honoured Lord” as “the poore players of the Black Fryers are threatened by the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London, never friendly to their calling, with the destruction of their means of livelihood by the pulling down of their plaiehouse, which is a private theatre and hath never giuen occasion of anger anie disorders.”

“These bearers are two of the chiefe of the companie; one of them by name Richard Burbidge, who humblie sueth for your Lordship’s kinde helpe, for that he is a man famous as our English Roscius, one who fitteth the action to the word, and the word to the action most admirably.”Thisquotation

This ‘document’ is another forgery of John Payne Collier and since these forgeries were exposed in 1853, no biographer should be using their contents as arguments in any ‘Life of William’ since that time. It should be obvious as a fraud to any historian on the subject merely by the statements made in the ‘document’ that the statements are either impossible or are meagre information known in the 19th century and not from what the ‘writer’ of the ‘document’ would have known at the time. It is admittedly not an original but a copy that ‘may have been furnished to the Lord Chancellor’. It is undated and without address and is signed, ‘Copia Vera’ ‘H. S.’.

from Hamlet’s admonition to the Players is something that 19th century writers would quote, but Southampton, who is supposedly writing this application, would not digress in his suit to give criticism of Richard’s acting ability to the Authority who is interested only in the point of the argument. The reference of Burbadge being ‘our English Roscius’ is right out of Francis Meres’ linking contemporary writers to their ancient Roman counterparts, ‘As Plautus among the Latines, so Shakespeare among ye English’, again this is a device known to the 19th century writer but one that would not concern Southampton in 1596, the time to which this spurious paper refers and not 1608. Meres made his comparisons in 1598. There was already another forged document mentioned in this biography concerning the same event, the petition of the Blackfriars residents of the Close that the author presents as genuine to support his argument, another Collier classic of calligraphy that has similar content, the mention of wives, families, widows and orphans. There follows this statement in reference to “Richard Burbidge” indicating the ‘d’ sound in the name, yet still misspelling it.

In the “Life of William Shakespeare’ by Sidney Lee (1898), the author quotes in its entirety an exact copy of a document and he introduces it by saying: “Another document has been handed down to us among the papers of Lord Ellesmere, which proves the strong interest Lord Southampton took about fifteen years afterwards in Shakespeare’s affairs.”

PROVIDING THE NON EXISTENT Robert J. Meyer

The theatre was owned by the Burbadges as of 1596, yet it was not used by them but by the choir boys in their play productions until the Burbadges opened it in 1608 for adult players, the time that the author dates this undated paper. There is a genuine document, a petition found that outlined the complaint of occupants of the Blackfriars Close petitioning against the use of the building for presenting plays in 1596, but the Burbadges were given permission to repair but not to enlarge the theatre. There was never any move to tear it down at any time. There follows:

This information definitely betrays it’s authenticity. The included remarks are a summary of points that were imagined in the 19th century that William was an actor, then a sharer which was first mentioned in the forgery, the unrequired mention of his writing being the ‘best’ plays and the mention of one specific Royal performance of the dozens in Elizabeth’s lifetime, the one mentioned in another forgery referring to a Christmas performance of 1593. Southampton would not be in position to know the exact date of one of any number of command performances that happened fifteen years before and previous to the present King James. Elizabeth had imprisoned Southampton by this time and she would be the last person that he would bring into a plea to the Lord Chancellor under the present King whom ‘Southampton’ mentions in the next sentence.

“The other is a man no whitt lesse deserving favor, and my especiall friende, till of late an actor of good account in the companie, now a sharer in the same, and writer of some of our best English playes, which, as your Lordship knoweth, were most singularly liked by Queene Elizabeth, when the companie was called upon to performe before her Majestie at Court at Christmas and Shrovetide.”

Southampton would never use the qualifier, ‘since coming to the crown’ as James was never in England until May of 1603 and could do nothing in London until he was ‘his most gracious Majestie’. An expert in Elizabethan spelling could easily recognize the imperfect consistency of this letter forger’s placing of final ‘e’s and other irregularities.

“Lord Southampton was clearly mistaken when he stated that the Blackfriars theatre had been built nearly fifty years: in 1608 it had been built about thirty three years.”

“This other hath to name William Shakespeare, and they are both of one couintie, and indeede almost of one towne: both are right famous in their qualityes though it longeth not of your Lo. gratuitie and wisdome to resort vnto the places where they are wont to delight the publiqueThisfare.”sentence, like the entire letter, gives positive proof that the letter was ‘written’ not to the Lord Chancellor but to the biographers of the mid 19th century. It refers only to those ‘documents’ that were known only in 1835 and it purports to supply authenticity to associations and statements of which there were no evidences in 1835 nor are there in the 21st century.

“His most gracious Majestie King James alsoe, since his coming to the crowne, that extended his royal favor to the companie in divers waies and at sundrie tymes.”

Naturally, the author also is clearly mistaken. The document continues.

‘Southampton’ refers to the King here but only to the information found in the document in which James gave his routine permission to the company of players that he was taking under his personal patronage to perform anywhere in the realm possibly as he liked witnessing plays in Scotland, all of which throws more doubt upon this paper. No one would need to tell the Lord Chancellor who the King’s Men are and the letter presumes that the Lord Chancellor would need to know this because he would not ‘resort unto the places’ where the company would perform.

It is astounding that Collier would write such easily detected falseness in his forgery unless he did so deliberately. Perhaps he thought that his contemporary historians were that gullible. He was right. They never revealed the duplicity for over twenty years and not because of obviously incorrect historical statements but upon ‘scientific’ proof of constructions with pen and ink.

The letter is being addressed ‘actually’ to Robert Cecil who was the most knowledgeable man of political and Court affairs in the country. He was the son of the former Lord Burlegh. He was in the House of Commons since 1584.

If anything, the forger of this ‘document’ supplied otherwise non-existent material in the empty ‘Legend of William’. He mentions everything that was missing: The content implies that Southampton was William’s ‘especiall friende’. It professes that someone, a nobleman, credited William at that time with being a ‘writer of some of our best English plays’. It claims that Richard Burbadge and William were born ‘almost of one towne’, Stratford. It is not certain where Richard was born, and this letter does not say exactly where, information that would be readily available at that time, but Richard was born around 1567 and if he lived very close to Stratford, he would have been well-known in Stratford and may have attended the free-school at the same time as William Shaksper, but there is no evidence of this, and it tends to the support the notion that ‘qualities’ referred at that time to ‘acting’ which is a later claim for Robert Greene’s use of the word in ‘Groatsworth’. The word is used here twice in describing Richard and William ‘By the exercise of his qualitye ‘and ‘both are right famous in their qualityes’.

He was Elizabeth’s chief adviser since 1589 and retained that post under James I. He knew everything that took place at Court and well beyond the walls of the City. Of course, he knew the playing company as they performed before court.

The Lord Chamberlain’s servants were paid in March 1595 or March 1594 according to the calendar of that time and no sooner. According to this ‘important information’ the payment was for two Court appearances at Greenwich Palace, and William is paid along with the other players, 6 pounds, 13 shillings and 4 pence ‘by way of her Majestie’s reward’ or 20 pounds, in all for the eight ‘sharers’. On Innocent’s Day and that night at Gray’s Inn Hall, they performed the short play ‘Comedy of Errors’. This occurred at ‘Christmas time’, 1594 and they were not paid until almost three months later on the Ides of March 1594 still by their calendar.

The fraud is not so much in Collier’s forging of the paper but in the biographers’ use of its forged content to support the continuance of the Legend. It took 22 years to prove these forgeries on technical grounds, but biographers ignore the obvious chronological and historical evidence against the validity of its content now even as they did n 1831. Ivor Brown says, 1949, P295:“But even those who decline company on the score of ‘pain’ can make exceptions.” “He was not a company keeper....lived in Shoreditch, wouldn‘t be debauched & if invited to writ, he was in Paine”. This is his mis reading of John Aubrey’s notes taken to be about William. Aubrey is quite clear in his notes as being ‘in pain’ does but not refer to being debauched and certainly not to being a company keeper, mentioned long before living in Shoreditch, as Brown implies but ‘in pain if invited to writ’.

In an effort to supply William with contact with London at an early date, Brown says P151: “It is late in December, 1594, that we reach the vitally important information left in the accounts of the ‘treasurer of the Chamber. This records payments to William Kempe, William Shakespeare, and Richard Burbadge, ‘servaunts to the Lord Chamberleyne, upon the Councelle’s warrant dated at Whitehall xv Marcij 1594, for twoe severall comedies or enterludes shewd by them before her majestie in Christmas tyme laste paste viz upon St. Stephen’s daye and Innocentes“Heredaye…’.”isconclusive evidence that Shakespeare was in the winter of 1594, aged thirty, established and important. He is one of his company’ triumvirate and that company was the Lord Chamberlain’s own and therefore connected to the Court. This, at least, is not conjecture: it is one of our few pieces of certain knowledge concerning his early conquest of the town.”

None of these conclusions can be drawn from this dubious ‘document’. William of Stratford who is the one that is supposed to be William the Poet, was the person claimed to be in the ‘flush of youth’ at the age of 30 and upon the unfounded belief, not supported by this ‘payment’, that he was an actor of Lord Hunsdon his servants and thereby he would mingle with the members of the Royal Court and frequent the salons of the aristocracy. There is no evidence that any of the prominent members of even the Burbadge family were entertained by members of society, invited to private mansions or entered the Royal Court by any other means than by the servant’s entrance, to do their acting job and to leave by that same door as in they went

From this one ‘document’ that claims that William to be an actor, but not the only reference that he was an actor, the other being the Blackfriars forgery, Ivor Brown concludes that William is ‘established and important’, is of the company’s ‘triumverate’ and ‘therefore connected to Court’, and he states that this is ‘not conjecture’ but one of ‘few pieces of certain knowledge’.

What are the chances of this ‘document’ being authentic when it would then be the only genuine document showing that William was an actor with the Burbadge company. Assuming that it is genuine, it would then be the only such payment of which there would be dozens issued by the same ‘treasurer of the Chamber’ stating the payments for a specific performance. There is no other such payment mentioned by any biographer but since a great many similar payments were made during Elizabeth’s time, this particular payment document is the only one that states the name of William as being one of the actors. Without access to this particular document, if it still exists, it is impossible to examine, but it has all the earmarks of the other forgeries supplying only that one missing element, the existence of a man who in no other document is recognized as havingBrownexisted.concludes his chapter, after concurring that the 18th century went to great lengths in filling the gaps according to its fancy by saying on the basis of this ‘document’: “The merging fact is that in 1594, still in the flush of youth, he had come through, had made himself by Venus and Adonis into the darling singer of the town and was heading a team of players. He would be meeting through one patron, Southampton, and through another, Lord Hunsdon, the Royal Chamberlain, such members of the Court and aristocracy as cared to exercise their wits with those of the poets and players and, to do so, invited them to their mansions as well as frequenting the salons or the taverns where such company was kept.”

“Those worth observing and of which wee tooke notice of were these…a neat monument of that famous English Poet, Mr. William Shakespear, who was borne here.” In 1673, “I, Robert Dobyns being at Stratford upon Avon and visiting the church there transcribed these two Epitaphs.” This was the flurry of interest in the half century following the publication of the Folio of 1623. There is no record of Ben Jonson or of any other London poet visiting Stratford at any time

Jonson’s work in progress was titanic After his completing the writing of a ‘survey’ on the art of poetry, a complete account of his walking trip to Scotland that would include Scottish customs, and as he had informed his friend Drummond at the time, a complete history of all England’s great men that would be ‘an epic poem’ in couplets. As he was still writing the life of Henry the Fifth, Ben borrowed books from the vast library of Sir Robert Cotton, his Westminster school chum and fellow Scottish descendant who used his riches to collect the books that he was to share not only with Ben but with all England when they finally became the foundation for the British Museum. Ben also borrowed books from another good friend, the lawyer John Selden, who became a greater scholar than the teacher William Camden, and also became one of the most influential parliamentarians in England. He called Ben his “beloved friend, that singular poet, Mr Ben Jonson, whose special worth in literature, accurate judgement and performance, known only to that few which are truly able to know him, that had from me, ever since I began to learn, an increasing admiration”.

THE ‘QUEST’ FOR SHAKE SPEARE Robert J. Meyer

The name ‘Shake speare’, as it appeared on several early Quartos, never sparked any interest as to who that ‘author’ was. There is no documented comment by anyone questioning the identity of the man behind the name and no one questioned who wrote those plays in Quartos that carried no author’s name. There is also no evidence of anyone from London, in the theatre or not, writing down that they had visited anyone with a name or similar to that name at Stratford.

These were only two phrases in a very large Folio of plays published in far off London that could stay for years in London Bookstalls without anyone at Stratford becoming aware of their existence, much less of their implication that their William was being briefly honoured therein.

Nowhere in any of Jonson’s references to the Plays, their contents or to their Author does Jonson even mention the name ‘William’ nor does he even say that he had visited anyone at Stratford or knew anyone there. The phrase, ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’ written into his Folio verse is the only allusion that seems to connect Stratford with the ‘Our Shakespeare’ of the Folio of 1632 nine years later. Jonson never made any similar reference again but returned to his style of criticism of the Plays that he had before. In 1623, Ben Jonson had still set for himself high and noble literary tasks even then when he was fifty, the age that biographers claim William of Stratford was ‘an old man’ long past his time of interest in writing plays. Is there a great artist since that ever gave up interest in his art long before his time ? They would be extremely few, if any but every claim by the historians makes this William unique in history.

All references and associations of ‘Shake speare’ and Stratford are after 1623 and they are sparse.In 1634, a Lieutenant Hammond happened to pass through Stratford in his travels and he recorded his visit to the “church in that towne” which “was built by Archbishop Stratford”.

Those who may have had first hand knowledge that the William Shaxper of Stratford was incapable of writing anything but his name was either never asked by an outsider or they knew nothing of that name being published in 1623. Many could not read and many never saw a stage. The surviving members of William of Stratford’s family made no comment upon the Folio and they may never have been aware of it. Any obscure reference buried in the poems of tribute as ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’ or ‘thy Stratford moniment’ may never have had any significance to those who knew the Stratford William even if they had, by chance, read them and that is doubtful.

In 1605, when Ben was imprisoned along with George Chapman for writing ‘Eastward Ho!’, the two dramatists wrote to influential friends “on prison polluted paper” as they called it. Both wrote letters of petition to the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Suffolk. Ben wrote to the new chief Secretary of State, the Earl of Salisbury, who was the most powerful man in all England, Robert Cecil, the son of Elizabeth’s most powerful Secretary of State, William Cecil. Writing in the letter of ‘former benefits’ that he had received from Cecil, Ben requested a hearing since he was ‘unexamined’ and “committed to a vile prison, and with me, one Mr Gorge Chapman, a learned and honest man”. Jonson is known to have written to several lords and to one lady in his quest. One lord was possibly Lord Aubigny who was to come to his aid and support after his play ’Sejanus’, about a Roman who was torn apart by a mob, and the play had, as Jonson said, “suffered no less violence from our people here, than the subject of it did from the rage of the people of Rome” Although Jonson in his attempt to gain the respect of the public, he ended under “the dull asses’ hoof”, but gained the admiration of the enlightened and cultivated men as was Lord Aubigny who opened his house to Jonson as a guest for five years.

‘William’ was never in a swordfight in the streets. He was never arrested or placed in a prison. He never wrote to a member of the aristocracy, never appeared before the Queen or before the King. William never .

. .

Where in all the thousands of thick tomes written about William of Warwickshire can anyone find a single tribute to the living man and not to the words printed in the Folio to compare to the smallest segment of this tribute of Selden’s to Ben Jonson ?

When Jonson printed ‘Sejanus’ two years later, he included “for the integrity of the story” 318 accurate marginal notes of his sources, unprecedented in publishing, and both Marston with whom he waged his ‘theatre war’ and his fellow prisoner, Chapman, wrote commendatory poems for the book, Chapman’s consisting of 200 lines of praise for the play that had raised “the people’s beastly rage, bent to confound thy grave and learned toil”. While in prison, Ben also wrote to a young Earl who, the year before, had married Robert Cecil’s niece just previous to her dancing role in Jonson’s ‘Masque of Blackness’, his first masque commissioned by King James. That Earl had a brother to whom Jonson also petitioned by letter as this Earl had been giving twenty pounds each Christmas to Jonson to ‘buy books’. To him, Ben wrote, “You have ever been free and noble to me, most honoured Earl, be hasty to our succour”. These lords were, of course, the nephews of Sir Philip Sidney, Philip Herbert, the Earl of Montgomery, and William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke. Who, can it be supposed, chose these ‘singular good lords’ when writing the ‘Dedication’ over the names ‘Heminge and Condell’ for the Folio of 1632 ? From prison, Chapman wrote to the King: “take merciful notice of the submissive sorrow of your two most humble and prostrated subjects.” Then, in 1623, Jonson had placed in the Stationers’ Register the entry of a nearly completed translation of almost 500 pages of Latin prose of a political romance called ‘Argensis’ that had been written originally by a friend of the King and “the King hath given order to Ben Jonson to translate it”. Ben had no great love of the book but he, as poet laureate, dutifully fulfilled the requests of the King as he had in all things for the past twenty years. In 1623, a house fire destroyed all of the manuscripts in Ben’s desk that he later listed in his poem of the burning as “an Execration upon Vulcan”. In the inferno were ‘the parcels of a play’ and the King’s ‘Argensis’ that he never rewrote.

READING THE ‘QUARTO VERSION’ OF HAMLET Robert J. Meyer A photograph of two pages from the First Quarto of ‘Hamlet’ appears in Peter Quenell’s book, and the pages are labelled as a ‘pirated’ version ‘including a garbled version of the Prince’s famous soliloquy’.

In 1597, William moved his family out of Henley Street in Stratford as he recently had bought from William Underhill, ‘New Place’, on the main street across the lane from the Gild Chapel with the schoolroom on the second floor. ‘New Place’ was a three storied house that Sir Hugh Clopton had built for himself. William was now a ‘householder in Chapel Street ward’. The house was well back from Chapel Street with ‘the gate and entrance [at the corner of Chapel Lane] there was before the House itself within a little courtyard, grass growing there, before the real dwelling house, this outside being only a long gallery &c and for servants’. William paid William Underhill L60 for the house with two barns and two gardens. The house had a frontage of more than 60 feet on Chapel Street, a depth of about 70 feet along Chapel Lane, and a height of 28 feet at the northern gable. It was a 15th century house that was pulled down before 1502 by Sir John Clopton and his new house was pulled down by Francis Gastrell in 1759. Sir Hugh Clopton, Lord Mayor of London in 1491 left ‘my grete house in Stratford upon Avon’ to William Clopton. It was leased to Dr. Thomas Bentley, a physician, by Henry VIII in 1532 until 1549.In 1597, the Shaxper family was unsuccessful in regaining Mary Arden’s land, ‘Asbies’, in Wilmcote from their Lambert relatives as John had spoiled that possibility. In 1598, Abraham Sturley informed his friend and neighbour, Alderman Quiney: “our countryman, Master Shaxper, is willing to disburse some money upon some odd yardland or other at Shottery or near about us. He thinketh it is very fit pattern to move him to deal in the matter of our tithes”.

In 1578, William was sued by Henry Higfor, steward of Stratford, for L30. On November 12, John and his wife and George Gibbes conveyed 86 acres in Wilmcote to Thomas Webbe and Humphrey Hooper. This land was then leased to Gibbes for 21 years from Michaelmas 1580. They were to receive it back in 1601, the year John died. On November 14, they mortgaged 56 acres on Wilmcote to Edmund Lambert, Mary’s sister’s husband to whom he was already in debt. Roger Sadler mentioned in his will that Lambert owed him L5 for the debt of John.

Robert J. Meyer When Hamnet Shaxper died in August 1596, his father, William Shaxper of Stratford had no male heir. On October 20 1596, a grant was given for a coat of arms for John Shaxper, his father. The application had grossly exaggerated John’s wealth: “hath lands and tenements; good wealth and substance: L500”. John was previously greatly indebted and so John’s heritage was invented in the application: “parents and late grandfather for faithful and valiant service were advanced and rewarded by the most prudent prince King Henry VII”. It said John “hath married the daughter and one of the heirs of Robert Arden of Wilmcote”. The first draft of the application said that Arden was a gentleman whereas he was known as a husbandman. He was actually a yeoman. There is no record of a ‘Shakespeare’ or a ‘Shaxper’ in service to Henry VII.

In 1579, a ninth share of two houses and 100 acres at Snitterfield were sold to Alexander Webbe’s son, Robert, on October 15 for L4. [‘L’ = Pound(s)]

In 1580, he was fined L20 for not appearing to find surety for keeping the peace, plus an additional L20 as a pledge for John Audely. William was living in the parish of St. Helen’s in Bishopsgate of London in 1596 and in the fall of 1596, he moved to Bankside. In November, Francis Langley was the owner of Paris Garden in Bankside, and builder of ‘The Swan Theatre’ by the river. William was to have appealed to the Surrey authorities for the sureties against the Justice of the Peace, William Gardiner and his step son, William Wayte. Later in the month, Wayte was to have “securities, against Langley, Shakespeare, Dorothy Soer and Anne Lee”, as it read.

REAL ESTATE 1596

In 1604, twenty bushels of malt were sold between March and May 1604 to apothecary and tobacco seller, Philip Rodgers who ‘borrowed 2s besides’. William put him into court to recover the money of L1:19:10 as he did also to Londoner John Clayton for L7 owing.

In 1605, William purchased a lease of tithes for L440 on July 24 from Ralph Hubaud, and a half share in the ‘tyithes of corne, grayine, blade, and heye from Old Stratford, Welcome and Bishopton’, confiscated from the College of Canons at the Reformation of Old Stratford, Welcome and Bishopton, and in the ‘tythes of wooll, lambe and other smalle and pryvie tythes’ from Stratford. Anthony Nashe of Welcome managed the tithes and rent, an income to William of L60 a year together with the small tithes of the whole parish over and above the rents.

In 1602, William was lodging with the Mountjoys at the corner of Silver Street and Mugle Street in the northwest corner of the walled city of London. In 1602, May 1st, he bought from William Combe of Warwickshire and John Combe of Old Stratford, at the cost of L320, 100 acres of arable land and 20 acres of pasture that the Clopton family had once owned. In September, he bought the copyhold of the Cottage opposite to ‘New Place’.

In 1608, William sued for a debt of L6 from John Adden Brooke and the following year was awarded the debt plus costs and damages.

In 1602, William bought the cottage across Chapel Lane from the garden of New Place along with a garden of a quarter-acre on September 28th.

In 1602, Ralph Brooke charged the Garter King of Arms with granting the Shaxpers with arms that “usurp the coat of the Lord Manley”. This dispute was settled so this meant that William was born a ‘gentleman’. Coats of Arms were granted usually to those who had prospered and could give good cause, but asking for coat of arms for your previous generation was most unusual, but it made William not only a gentleman, he was retroactively born a gentleman. The word, ‘gentleman’ meant a person of good breeding and bearing, of civil demeanour and decent behaviour.

On May 1st, 1602, William bought for L320 “fowre yarde lande of errable lande conteyninge by estimacion One hundred and Seaven acres be they more or lesse And also all the Common pasture for Sheepe horse kyne or other Cattle In the feildes of Olde Stetford aforesaide to the said fowre yarde lande belonginge or in any wise apperteyninge…”

In 1613, William bought the house over the gate in Blackfriars as an investment and was joined in the indenture with John Heminges, William Johnson and John Jackson. He bought on March 10th and mortgaged the property on March 11th. This great amount of documented evidence in the financial affairs of a man named William Shaxper of Stratford could possibly be duplicated for most other residents of the towns around London in the early 17th century. This particular resident had a name of William Shaxper that was close enough to the name of ‘William Shakespeare’ found on a number of Quartos published in London during the centuries early years.

Quiney wrote to Sturley from London in October of his hopes: “that our countrymen Master William Shaxper would produce us money which I will like of as I hear when where and how; and I pray let not go that occasion if it may sort to any indifference conditions.”

In 1598, Stratford Town Council recorded payment to “William Shaxper” of 10p for a load of stone. Also in that year, William was assessed for taxation in Bishopsgate, London, two years after he had moved from there, and once more the subsidy of 13s 4p went unpaid. He had been assessed in 1596 in St. Helen’s in London.

This was sufficient for the first ‘biographers’ of the plays’ ‘author’ long after another one hundred years to claim that the Master Poet was this one man who lacked any association to the theatre world of London. He owned no books, was not known to write anything other than his signature, had no knowledge of anyone on the London stage, and could not be confirmed during his lifetime that he had attended a play in London.

The name on the Quartos and on the Folios of 1623 and 1632 was never identified with any living person and no document or letter by any of the dozens of well known personages of the age acknowledged knowing who wrote the plays of the Folio with the exception of Ben Jonson or as he is to have written in the Folio. All biographies from 1700 onward are upon the supposition without evidence that the Stratford man was ‘the Poet’.

Dr John Hall, the physician, married William’s daughter, Susanna, when she was 24 on the 5th of June 1607. John was 32, the son of a physician, born in Bedfordshire and he was a Cambridge man. Their daughter was christened Elizabeth on the 21st of February 1608. Elizabeth married Thomas Nashe, 33, the son of Anthony Nashe, William Shaxper’s friend. Thomas Nashe died inWilliam’s1647.

There are very few documents, some a single sheet of paper, that hold the name in several forms of ‘Shaksper’ that to a person or persons who are stated to have lived in London at various addresses during the early 1600s. It is not known for certain if all or most of these names refer to William of Stratford but assuming that some or all are that gentleman, the following items are noted.There is a document that states the name as that of a resident of St Helens, a street in the eastern part of London. This is known as there were small taxes owing that were never paid and it was finally concluded after a period of two or three years that the stated person had moved out of the ward and he could not be located anywhere in London.

Dr Hall and his wife lived at New Place in Stratford with William and his wife during William’s last days, but none of the well bred patients ever left any indication that they had trusted their well being with the son in law of the famous Poet and Playwright of London.

Dr Hall kept a precise record of his patients in an account book stating their ailments and his prescriptions for them. One of these patients was the Countess of Northampton, the daughter and heiress of Sir John Spence, Lord Mayor of London, called the ‘rich Spence’. Hall prescribed for her, March 16 1620, a decoction containing 28 herbs and drugs since she ‘fell into that dropsy called anasarca with swelling of the face and feet’. Every third day she was purged with another mixture “a decoction in white wine after which she was perfectly cured and brought to a good colour in 20 day’s space.”

RESIDENCES OF WILLIAM SHAXPER Robert J. Meyer

“Malone speaks of a certain paper which was before him as he wrote which belonged to Edward Alleyne, the player, and from which it appeared that in1596, Shakespeare lived in Southwark, near the Bear Garden. Malone makes this statement in his ‘Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Papers’ which were forged by that scapegrace William Ireland, and eminent palaeographers and Shakespearian scholars will have it that there was contamination in the subject and that the brief memorandum which Mr. Collier brought forward as the paper to which Malone referred is also spurious.” [From ‘Memoirs of William S.’ P66] This refers to the notation on a small slip of paper now in a ‘Dulwich College collection’ states in its entirety, “Inhabitantes of Sowtherk as have complained, this of July 1596, Mr Markis, Mr Tuppin, Mr Langorth, Wilson the pyper, Mr Barett, Mr Shaksper, Phellipes, Tomson, Mother Golden the baude, Nagges, Filpott and no more, and so well ended”. This was the fraud.

In 1602, a ‘Shaksper’ was lodging in an upper floor of the house of Christopher Mountjoy, a French Hugenot who was a tire maker, a headdress and wig maker, residing and engaging in his business at the corner of Silver Street and Mugle Street [or Monkwell Street] in Cripplegate Ward. The gate in this northwest corner of the walled City was at the north end of Lytl Wood Street that ran into St Alban to the south and into Wood Street south of that again, down to Chepesyde.

estate went to his granddaughter, who married again, this time to John Barnard, Lord of the Manor at Abington. Barnard was made a baronet. Lady Barnard died in 1670, her property going to Sir John who died in 1674 leaving his family ‘all the books’ and with pictures, ‘old goods and lumber at Stratford upon Avon’.

In March 1613, William of Stratford is documented as having purchased the house over the great gate into the Blackfriars as ‘an investment’. He paid Henry Walker, citizen and minstrel of London, LL140 for the house. Joined with him in the indenture were John Heminges, John Jackson and William Johnson, citizen and vintner of London, the host of the Mermaid Tavern in Bread Street. The document names him as, “William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon in the county of Warwickshire, gentleman”, but the spellings in this ‘printing’ have been ‘modernized’.

On September 11, 1611 William Shaxper was listed among 71 citizens who had contributed “towards the charge of prosecuting the Bill in parliament for the better repair of the highways and amending divers defects in the statutes already made”.

At the west end of Silver, immediately west of Mountjoy’s house, the curved street to the wall is Noble Street that becomes Foster Lane south to Chepesyde. All but Mugle and Silver Streets remain with these original names.

These entries are possibly the only references to a ‘Shakespeare’ in any form in London and Stratford during all of these years. Not one of them identifies the name with the name on the Folio and it is assured that every resource has been used throughout the 19th century to find references to the name in London during the intervening years from 1800 to the present.

Although 17th century testaments and wills of yeomen farmers lists a few favourite volumes, there is no mention in William’s will of any books, manuscripts, quartos, copies or reference books. Yet he is not known to have sold or to have given to anyone anything he owned.

In 1612, Mountjoy’s son in law brought suit that he had not received his dowry and William had to appear in London to assist in the Court dispute. He is quoted at great length as to his knowing the two men for ten years and that he had been entreated to encourage said Stephen Belott to marry Mary Mountjoy but that he “remembereth not what certain portion in marriage Belott was promised”. During September of 1614, Arthur Mainwaring proposed a scheme that gained support of other Warwickshire capitalists to use more scientific agricultural methods and so enrich the landlords. They were opposed by the villagers who were accustomed to till the medieval open strip fields, gather turf and firewood from the adjacent common and graze their animals upon the rough grass. Thomas Greene, the Town Clerk, often consulted William on this. In preparing a petition to the Privy Council, he recorded that “at my cousin Shaxper coming to town, I went to see him how he did”, and discussed the ‘Welcome enclosure problem’ as it was known. “He and Mr Hall say they think there will be nothing done at all.” On December 25th, Greene wrote to William “a note of the inconveniences would grow by the enclosure”. The scheme eventually fell through.In1614,

In 1612, William purchased land in Old Stratford, 127 acres of land at the end of the town by the church along the road from New Place. Brother Gilbert was a haberdasher of St. Brides in London. Brother Edmund had a ‘base child’ buried at St. Giles in 1607 and Edmund was buried at St. Saviour’s, Southwark on December 31, 1607.

On the day following, William mortgaged the house but he left it in his will to Susanna.

William was chosen to entertain a visiting preacher receiving from the Stratford Corporation a quart of sack and a quart of claret that had cost them 20 pence.

A portrait of the Somerset House Conference, printed in ‘Shakespeare’ by F.E. Halliday on page 95, shows eleven men sitting on two sides of a table that is claimed to indicate that ‘Shakespeare’ was “on duty as Groom, of the Chamber” when in March of 1604 King James I made his long delayed state progress through the City of London and “Shakespeare as a groom of the chamber was given his scarlet livery for the occasion”. This is stated upon the assumption that ‘Shakespeare’ was a member of the ‘Kings Men’ company of actors but there is no evidence that the author of ‘Hamlet’ did any duties to the King as he did not belong to any acting group.

Or perhaps you’ve read his ‘The Woman Hater’ ?

At the birth of William Shaxper’s first child, a daughter, he named her after no one in either family. She was named Susanna. Twenty months later, when his twins were born, he named them ‘Hamnet’ and ‘Judith’. Had he scanned with his great imagination inventive names from the literature of antiquity or was ‘Hamnet’ a prescient play upon the name of the Great Dane ? No, the boy was named after Hamnet Sadler, his friend and neighbour.

He’s mulling over the wine he nurses In his alabaster pitcher With his partner in crime of dramatical comical scenes in lyrical blank verses, Yea, that is the dramaturge, John Fletcher !

Over there in the stall with his half filled vessel, Young Francis Beaumont. You know his ‘Knight of the Burning Pestle’ ?

Entering now is Michael Drayton, gazetteer of Polyoblion; With him, doctor, lawyer, musical poet, champion of this moment, Thomas Campion.

The Mermaid Tavern ! Oh, the Mermaid ! Oh, that name ! Oh, to see Where all the illustrious poets came in well content camaraderie ! And did their new made madrigals sing ! Hear the low beamed rafters ring With boisterous laughter and stout cheers for those new sonnets read As pewter pots of ale, and cheese and new baked bread Filled the board until another man enthused Would rise and take the floor and tell them all the welcome news Of his latest penned and tragic play, And to the noisy, jostling swarm he would propose That all should go the morrow’s day To see and hear his thoughts performed Across the Thames at the Swan or Rose. Again today whoever goes to that same pub, The one on Chepesyde where the Mermaid Club Still meets meets still as ghosts. The membership’s the same, They all will be your eager hosts. Still illustrious is each name. Though now they are four centuries old. That same ‘sirenaical’ fraternity, those gentle men still hold Us with all their memoried words on faded pages. There stands the revolutionary John Donne, Beautiful yet, and dazzling at thirty one. Great London edifices endure though ages, Architecturized by one in bricks and stones, His name is carved on the Mermaid wall: ‘Here sits Inigo Jones’

But tarry, more members will come to the Mermaid later. Wait now, here he comes in all good humour, in it or out of it, Jonson’s the clever one, no doubt about it. He is the pride of every jolly gentleman. That’s no rumour. That’s our Ben ! Who ? Where is who ? No, you must be thinking of another pub. There’s no one known by that name here. No his was never a member of the Mermaid Club. No one here called…what was it ? Wllm Shaxpere ?

This idiom is present in some lines of ‘The Contention’, ‘for to obey’ used by two characters in one short passage, and ‘for to win’ in another. This idiom does not appear anywhere in the ‘Second Part of Henry VI’, all such passages are omitted or reworded, so that in passages that are found in both the earlier and the later versions, this idiom does not appear in either version. Examination has found that although George Peele also may have used this idiom a half dozen times in all his works as did other contemporaries and successors, ‘Shakespeare and Marlowe never used this uncouth old idiom’.

Some critics claim that William was the sole author of ‘3 Henry VI’ having written the Clifford speech in the original and excised the Richard speech replacing it with the speech more matching ‘in Phrase and diction’. They look upon the excised speech as being totally ‘un Shakespearian’, that it could not be more unlike the Clifford speech ‘in all traits of thought and diction’.

In determining the authorship of both ‘The First Part of the Contention’ and ‘The True Tragedie’, examiners, Mr. Knight, Mr, Dyce, Mr. Malone and others of the 19th century have looked for identification marks of their true author, or authors, seeking ‘habitual turns of expression’ that authors cannot abandon for long. In the words of Robert Greene, they discovered his use of the idiom ‘for to’ as many as four times in twenty lines.

Since the idiom is also present in some passages of ‘The True Tragedie’, but never in its revision, ‘3 Henry VI’, it is reasonable to conclude that the original two plays were not the entire invention of one author, but who was the major author in each, the one who wrote the passages that are kept intact in the revised ‘Henry Vi’ plays ? Some believe the author to be Marlowe, some believe the author was William and that this is ‘proof’ that William excised the lines that were not his in the originals and wrote new lines when revising the original plays into the Henry VI plays, but Marlowe is the only author up to this date known ever to use this idiom. Why, then, is this not evidence that Marlowe was the reviser of both original plays ? The only reason to say that William never used the idiom is that it is not found in any of the later plays that are only now ascribed to him. To the date of these contested plays, William was not known even as a name, nor is there any play written before this date that has been ascribed to that name.

“Rich: Now Clifford, for young York and Rutland’s death, This thirsty sword that longs to drinke thy blood Shall lop thy limmes, and slise thy cursed heart, For to revenge the murders thou has made” is replaced by: “Rich: Now Clifford, I have singled thee alone; Suppose this arm is for the Duke of York And this for Rutland; both bound for revenge, Wert thou environ’d with a grazed wall.”

Clifford’s seven line speech is fully retained: “Cliff: Now, Richard, I am with thee here alone; This is the hand that stabb’d thy father York; And this the hand that slew thy brother Rutland; And here’s the heart that triumphs in their death, And cheers these hands that slew thy sire and brother And so, have at thee.”

PLAYS BEFORE 1594 Robert J. Meyer

The preciseness in which the ‘Reviser’ excises certain lines is quite apparent in examples revealed: In the ‘True Tragedie’, a scene of only three speeches in fourteen lines is revised into ‘3 Henry VI’ as scene 4 of Act II. The four line speech of Richard is one of the very few speeches entirely rejected in the entirety of the revised play.

True, the original lines do contain that Greene idiom ‘for the revenge’ and the line ‘Shall lop thy limmes and slise they cursed heart’ can be traced to Greene’s lines in his ‘James the Fourth’: ‘for aye so lop thy limbs’ and in his ‘Orlando Furioso’: “or slice the tender fillets of my life”.. These lines, the critics say, are not ‘Pistolio Nym ic’ that William could not have written them, therefore he wrote the substituted ‘better’ lines and all of ‘3 Henry VI’.

However, in the revised following scene 5 of ‘3 Henry VI’ upon the death of Clifford, Richard in a six line speech says, “He lopp’d the branch in hewing Rutland” that parallels “shall lop thy limmes”, with limbs and branch both ‘lopp’d’ and “his murdering knife” that parallels “This thirsty sword” in the excised speech of Scene 4. Later, in Scene 5, Richard says of Clifford, the dead man who had killed Richard’s brother and father that he wishes Clifford were again alive so that: “I know by that he’s dead; and, by my soul, If this right hand would buy two hour’s life, That I in all despite might rail at him, This hand should chop it off, and with the issuing blood Stifle the villain whose unstaunched thirst York and young Rutland could not satisfy.” Bombast and blood, yet this is in keeping with the chosen theatrical portrait of Richard, however imperfect, for the historical Richard. This may indicate that the reviser was interested in ridding the passage of the idiom ‘for to’ and inserting those parallel lines to Clifford’s lines rather than eschewing the ‘bombast’ lines, “this arm for the Duke of York and this for Rutland” to “This is the hand that stabb’d thy father York and this the hand that slew thy brother Rutland” which at that point permits Clifford to utter the ‘bloody’ words and not Richard in the revised versionExaminers have hotly contested the question of which sections of the two original plays were written by whom. Some who do not believe that Marlowe wrote them still say that “the author of Faustus and Edward the Second was undoubtedly the most gifted dramatic writer of his time, except Shakespear”. R. Malone, Mr. Dyce and others have attributed these two plays to Marlowe for several reasons: Mr. Dyce: because Peele and Greene were unequal to the best scenes, “We might therefore confidentially ascribe to Marlowe a large portion of both, even if both did not in some passages closely resemble his ‘Edward the Second’. Indeed I have a strong suspicion that the ‘First Part of the Contention’ and ‘The True Tragedy’ are wholly by Marlowe” (Dyce’s ‘Shakespeare’, Vol 1, P xiii) Mr Dyce does not rely on opinion alone as some of the others do, but forwards some parallel lines from Marlowe’s ‘Edward the Second’ to ‘The Contention’ and ‘True Tragedy’. “Stern Falconbridge commands the narrow seas.” The True Tragedy. “The haughty Dane, commands the narrow seas.” Edward II. “What, will the aspiring bloud of Lancaster Sink into the ground ? I had thought it would have mounted.” The True Tragedy “Frown’st thou there at aspiring Lancaster ?” “(And) “highl y scorning that the lowly earth Should drink his blood, mounts up to the air” - Edward II. These and other examples are countered by saying that ‘Edward II’ was written after the two plays, which, if it were, it may suggest that Marlowe had been so strongly impressed by some parts of the two plays “that he not only strove to emulate their power and freedom, but unconsciously reproduced some of their language”.

The writer proceeds to give evidence that such “similarity of thought and phraseology” can be depended upon but little in “deciding a question of disputed authorship” by citing several such similar likenesses between Marlowe and those now credited to William. Two are related to the Henry VI plays: “He wears a Lord’s revenue on his back.” Edward II (Marlowe) “She bears a duke’s revenue of her back.” 2 Henry VI Act I Sc 3 (‘Shakespeare’) These arms of mine shall be thy sepulchre.” - Jew of Malta Act III (Marlowe) “These arms of mine shall be thy winding sheet, My heart, sweet boy, shall be thy sepulchre.” 3 Henry VI Act II Sc 5 (Marlowe) Almost equally in contention is whether Marlowe also wrote ‘Richard III’. “Are not thy bells hung up as monuments ?” Doctor Faustus “Our bruised arms hung up for monuments.” Richard III Act I, Sc I, Fifth line.

Playwrights were busy men. They relied upon source material that had to be present within their possession and upon their individual skills at inventing dialogue to make their dramatic statements. How would Marlowe have access to these two plays if he did not have a hand in writing them ? Does he copy down lines from the manuscripts of his friends or from someone living whom he doesn’t know ? He knew them all. These would be playwrights, in the opinion of the critics, to whom he is superior. If he saw these plays at the theatres, he must, by reason, have seen many other plays. Then what is it about these two particular plays that he emulates small sections from them to the exclusion of all other plays.

Marlowe either wrote these plays or he did not. If he did not, then it is highly unlikely that Marlowe, while busy in the act of writing, recalls seeing a play to which he has no copy, these two plays not being printed until 1594-5, and he is so impressed with certain sections, being new to him, that he strove to emulate the power and the freedom of this passage and that line which he ‘unconsciously reproduced’ some phrases from two long plays into only ‘some scenes’ of his Edward II. If Marlowe did write the un revised lines of the two plays, then it matters not that he wrote Edward II during or after writing either the ‘Contention’ or the ‘Tragedy’. No one makes mention that an author may work on several plays over the same time and that an earlier begun play may be set aside while completing a later begun play or that the last half of a play may precede the writing of the first half, or that any portion may be rewritten at any time. The critics always confront their readers with statements that ‘this play’ was written before ‘that play’ when there is no evidence whatever to say that the entire play was written before another entire play except that it may be known when the first performances may have taken place which has no bearing upon the completion of writing date. Revisions may come after the first performance as they still do today. The author of the Henry VI essay in ‘The Stratford Shakespeare’ sees little difference between the writings of Peele, Greene or Marlowe when compared to the two plays, “except one or two scenes of Edward the Second of Marlowe”. He reveals that one of the parallel lines mentioned by Dyce is “entirely excluded” in the revised Henry VI, as if Marlowe would never exclude one of this own phrases when rewriting a passage as that is why a play is amended. No one can ever conceive of William expunging one of his phrases and this is the reason for believing that William wrote all the best parts of the original plays, cancelled out all the other fellow’s poor, poor dumb mouthings and finally substituted all the fine new passages with nary a blot upon the page.

In Marlowe’s play, Doctor Faustus receives this curse: “Dam’d art thou, Faustus, Dam’d: despair and die !”

There follow the ghosts of Rivers, Vaughan, Hastings, the two young Princes, and Lady Ann who all repeat the phrase, “Despair and die !”, six times more. All of the examples brought forward are those between known Marlowe plays and those suspected to be by Marlowe but are those credited in the First Folio to ‘William S’. In all instances, they separate Marlowe from any other contemporary writer, Peele, Greene et al, indicating that he was unlike every other dramatist except ‘the one who wrote the Plays of the Folio’ but who is the one who wrote those ?

Ghost of Henry VI: “Think on the tower and me: despair and die ! Harry the Sixth bids thee despair and die.”

Three classes of writing in the original plays and their revised versions are the concern of the argument: Those lines or sections that are retained completely or almost intact in the revision; those sections completely rejected during the revision; those new sections that appear only in the revision. The general opinion is that the original plays were written by more than one person, and the lesser sections that were entirely rejected in the revision contained many Greene isms and lines that were ‘incongruous of thought’, meanness and exaggeration of style or ‘feeble monotony of verse’. Some critics say that the reviser wrote those lines that were retained and those that required very little alteration, but that the reviser did not write the rejected line. Most of these opinions claim that the reviser, then, was William, that he wrote the best lines of the original but not the others and then, in replacing the rejected lines, matched the unchanged lines with lines of equal quality.

This is the only such controversy in English history and the only reason for it is to shore up the vacancy of a ‘dramatist’ who has a human history to separate those Plays whose only identity is the name that appeared on a few Quartos only and then in 1623 they were published in one volume along with many other plays that had appeared on stages but not with any author’s name on any previous publication. The main goal of the exercise is to separate any known playwright of the time from having any hand in the finished plays as found in the First Folio.

This is the famous opening soliloquy which is upon the same theme as his soliloquy in ‘3 Henry VI’ his deformity, his inability to charm the ladies, his determination, then, to be the “Butvillain.stay, what star shines yonder in the east ?

Ghost of Clarence: “Think of me, and fall on thy edgeless sword: despair, and die !”

It is the East, and Juliet is my sun” Romeo and Juliet [Going to execution] “Weep not for Mortimer That scorns the world, and as a traveller Goes to discover countries yet unknown” Edward II “The undiscover’d country from whose bourn No traveller returns” - Hamlet Act III sc I “Tut, I am simple, without mind to hurt, And have no gall at all to grieve my foes!” Dido, Queen of Carthage “But I am pigeon liver’d and lack gall To make oppression bitter”

Ghost of Edward: “Think how thou stabb’dst me in my prime of youth At Tewksbury: despair therefore and die !”

The loadstar of my life, is Abigail” Jew of Malta “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks ?

Hamlet Act II Sc ii

In Richard III, Act V Sc3, the Ghost of Prince Edward appears to Richard saying:

The second play, ‘The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of York’, needed far less revision as it is recognized as the better of the two original plays and the revision is the better of the two revisions with its creation of the first fully developed villain in English drama, the character of ‘Gloster’ that continues into the play ‘Richard III’ with all the same purpose and traits of speech as the Gloster in ‘3 Henry VI’.

It seems a more human approach to assume that Marlowe was the reviser of these plays than to assume, as the critical examiner does, that Marlowe would never revise or reject his own imperfect writing to imply that he was not capable of writing as fine a work as the revisions on the basis that he had never reached that height of quality before, not even in his ‘last’ play, Edward II. Which other author has been so evaluated ?

A more reasonable suggestion that is still supported by the same literary observations is that Marlowe wrote both the retained sections and those that the reviser rejected. Why would Marlowe have permitted a play to be produced when it was not the best that it could be ? He must have had a special reason. The man was human. He was completely shaken by his duelling encounter in Hoglane where his close fiend, Tom Watson, interceded on his behalf and killed his attacker. Marlowe was even further shocked by his short term in gaol and by Watson’s imprisonment and subsequent death. This occurred in September of 1589 just previous to the estimated time that the two original plays were written. Marlowe, as did the other playwrights, still needed money and it is not conjecture in the extreme to suppose that he wrote the ‘Contention’ and the ‘True Tragedie’, both on the same subject that he had essayed in his ‘Harry vj’ and he had not the time nor the spirit to give the first of these plays all the care that he would want to give to it before it was produced. His friend, Robert Greene, may have contributed to get it onto the stage when promised which may explain the ‘Greene isms’, Marlowe having turned to him after the death of Watson. Critics of these contested plays never enter into the private lives of those involved. They never relate the tensions in their lives, the intrigues or the events around them. The events in the life of Marlowe are known and recorded. No one knows anything about ‘who was Shakespeare’ or about anything in ‘his life’ that is entirely unknown, yet, they make endless searches though the plays ‘to read the biography of the Great Author’ whom they claim never needed to revise his work, never would brook an imperfect line, never daubed a blot upon a page.Marlowe, as great a dramatist as he was in 1590 1593, was not a titan. He was 26 in 1590 but with a solid record of continued improvement. Being in better spirits at a later date, Marlowe should be qualified to recognize the imperfect sections that he knew at the time were not the best, but being in need for money, he let out the play for production, imperfect as it was. ‘The First Part of the Contention’ was well received, and it is known that the play was printed and was performed for many years in its original form. This play was named ‘The First Part’ that showed the intention of the author was to continue the subject with which he, Marlowe, was familiar and he already had the ‘History’ before him on his table.

The basis of reasoning constantly changes to accommodate every possible exception as the similarity to Marlowe appears and is acknowledged and no one has yet entertained the possibility that if all evidence separates Marlowe from all his contemporaries “except for Shakespeare” who has never been identified as to being a living person, no one has suggested that the later plays were the work of the author who grew in ability and advanced from his first completed plays that all acknowledge grew in stature in Marlowe’s ‘lifetime’.

Of the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI, the critic has said that “the supposition that there was another playwright of the time, an obscure man, unvoiced by rumour and forgotten by tradition who wrote such dramatic poetry and such comic scenes which are so much in the style of Shakespeare, is too absurd to be entertained for a moment.”

The two known facts about the ‘The Contention’ and ‘The True Tragedie’ are their approximate dates of production, all before 1593, and that they were produced by ‘the Lord Pembroke his servants’. Any supposition as to how and by whom they were written must accommodate verifiable and documented evidence. The essayist in ‘The Stratford Shakespeare’ answers the question of how “to account for the existence of ‘The First Part of the Contention’ and ‘The True Tragedie’ and the ‘Second and Third Parts of King Henry the Sixth’ in the composite state that we find them” and how “to reconcile all the external evidence on the one side and the other as to their authorship” by saying that “Greene, Marlowe, Shakespeare and perhaps Peele wrote The First Part of the Contention’ and ‘The True Tragedy’ together for the Earl of Pembroke’s Company” and that “afterwards made these plays into ‘The Second and Third Parts of King Henry VI’ for the company he came exclusively connected” and that is how passages distinguished by the marks of Greene’s or Marlowe’s style are found side by side with those which are stamped with a name ‘Shake speare’.

Yet, this entire supposition is exactly that which is forwarded by saying that William wrote either or both of the original plays and the two parts of Henry VI. Before 1593, the name of ‘William S.’ was not only obscure but totally unknown in London; he was completely ‘unvoiced by rumour’ during the period to 1623, and after 1623, he was not ‘forgotten by tradition’ but ‘created by tradition’, a tradition that is particularly blank through to the 19th century when it was built upon invented stories, impossible anecdotes of his youth, totally fictitious accomplishments, an almost endless category of occupations, confused with created relatives, and numerous ‘found’ documents revealed to be deliberate forgeries and several very old and anonymous portraits of unknown gentlemen. Exactly what is this ‘style of Shakespeare’ ? Are the Henry VI plays ‘so much in the style’ of the later plays or are the later plays a gradual development ‘so much in the style’ of the Henry Vi plays ? “To say that someone whom we do not know wrote these two plays is absurd”, but the ‘someone’, a living person whom we are told wrote these plays, was and still is unknown and was never mentioned by anyone in history. The ‘name’ that was printed on a few Quartos and a Folio never appeared in London or Stratford records, no birth, marriage or deceased date.

To say, and not until a half century later, that during this time another man was writing the same subjects from the same sources, working within the small world of the Theatre in London among the same actors, theatre owners and commentary writers without leaving any trace of comment among these contemporaries and then to say that this man towered above all by his mark of genius is to say the same absurdity.

Plays of any kind in English were few before 1586. There were almost no precedent plays to emulate, fewer of any great worth. Blank verse had just been introduced. The new young playwrights upon the London scene had all been university trained which gave them a few years of opportunity to translate the classic authors and to essay the writing of original plays in English. When Marlowe came to London in 1587 at the age of 23, he had already established the style of his writing in his ‘Tamburlaine’, a style that no other of the contemporary playwrights had introduced. It was new and it was popular enough for him to continue in that style, and others followed in it as did Thomas Kyd.

This supposition is based upon two documents, ‘Groatsworth of Wit’ by Robert Greene and the ‘Blackfriars’ paper; which the essayist quotes as being proof that William was a ‘sharer’ in the ‘Blackfriars Company’ in 1589 along with Burbadge and others, later known to be members of ‘The Lord Strange his servaunts’.

All of these statements are made by writers from 1810 to the present, and not from any written word of any contemporary person from 1587, whether commoner, writer, playwright or Poet Laureate.Byciting these ‘documents’, the essayist claims that these original plays were written by William “for the Blackfriars Theatre and obtained so much money and applause that the Earl of Pembroke’s Company sought to produce them for their own use from actor’s parts and stenographic reports (common means to such ends in those days), and did procure them in a much mutilated form, which Greene and Marlow were employed to hastily patch up, partly from memory and partly by their own invention.”

However, the entire supposition has no basis whatever as the ‘Blackfriars’ paper that seemingly supports the premise that William was active as a member of Blackfriars Theatre in 1589 is a forgery of the 1830’s and was exposed and finally known as such in the 1850’s and should never had been considered by any commentator after that time. There never was a ‘Blackfriars Company’ and no adult company used the Blackfriars building until 1608.

Rather than accounting “for the remarkable continuity in those plays of passages which are manifestly the production of different hands, and some of which are so miserably poor while others that immediately precede or follow them are so admirable”, as the essayist professes, it would be remarkable that Marlowe or Greene or anyone would be able to remember some entire passage absolutely word perfect and then muddle along with some ‘miserable’ inventions to fill the gap.This entire idea of ‘stenographic’ reports and purloining of actor’s parts that were supposed to be well guarded, was not a ‘common means to such ends in those days’, but an illogical explanation invented in a later century to account for these differences in the text of early printed Quartos from those of the First Folio, the text of which is usually presented as the original, true and authentic first versions from the pen of William, the exact wording, ‘absolute’, ‘as he conceived them’, ‘with scarce a blot on his papers’. All other versions are considered to be ‘surreptitious copies’ ‘maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors’, as Heminges and Condell are claimed to have said, and so was contrived this later explanation of inexact and invented versions stolen from actor’s parts or the results of poor memory of hundreds of lines. These methods were not a custom ‘in those days’ as these particular early Quartos are the only plays referred to as being so ‘corrupted’. Differing versions of other plays, those of Marlowe or Jonson, are not even mentioned, far less considered the result of this ‘common means to such an end in those days’.

By this, the essayist infers that William wrote the plays by himself for the ‘Blackfriars Theatre’ and the only reason that Marlowe or Greene were involved is that the Pembroke company, ‘employed’ them to write the missing parts that they couldn’t remember which would account for the imperfect originals known to be performed by the ‘Pembroke his servants company. The inference would also explain the revised plays as being the versions that William originally wrote in their entirety, eliminating the necessity of him having to revise a co operatively-written ‘original’. All of these claims were based on the Collier forgeries that the essayist must have known, but yet ignores.

If Jonson is correct in the years mentioned, it would place the writing of ‘Titas’ between 1584 and 1589. The only ‘external’ evidence link in this play to ‘William’ is the 1623 Folio except for what most commentators hold dear, the ‘Palladis Tamia’ of Francis Meres (1598) that credits ‘William’ with this play along with the otherwise un credited plays, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, ‘Richard the II and III’, ‘Henry IV’ and ‘King John’

Since the two original plays were produced in 1591 and 1592, they must have been written at an even earlier date, long before the name, ‘William S.’ was ever witnessed on paper, but any critics of the late 1800’s still relied upon the proven forgery to establish a writing career for him in 1589. With no Blackfriars Company for anyone to write for, the ‘so much money and applause’ was never obtained by anyone. The Earl of Pembroke’s company, then, had no reason to ask anyone to purloin the plays and make up lines they could not remember.

Robert Greene’s ‘Groatsworth of Wit’ is always cited by late biographers as ‘proof’ of William’s activity as a writer in 1592, but Greene never mentioned any ‘playwright’ other than those to whom he addressed his remarks and he never mentioned ‘plagiarism’, or ‘William’ in that paper, but the essayist brings in ‘Groatsworth’ to support his claim for William saying that Greene in 1592, “directly accused Shakespeare of being tricked out in the feathers of Greene himself, Marlowe and Peele that he indirectly designated one of these plays as having furnished the plumes of which they had been despoiled”. Robert Greene did not accuse anyone of literary plagiarism, he did not refer to an yone ‘under the name of Shakespeare’. The ‘Shake scene’ idiom was not used as a proper name in the context and the only reason it was capitalized is that all nouns were capitalized but writers now leave only ‘Shake-scene’ with a capital ‘S’. Greene never accused any of ‘being tricked out in feathers’ nor did he mention anyone having written plays other than Marlowe and the two others whom he addressed in his writing, and he did not mention the plays of Henry VI, directly or ‘indirectly’.

The contention about authorship continues in other plays written during the years before 1594. The earliest copy of ‘Titus Andronicus’ is dated 1594 and other editions are in 1600 and 1611, none of which contained the author’s name, nor did three editions of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ or editions of ‘Henry Part I’, ‘Henry V’ or ‘Richard II’. The 1600 edition states that ‘Titus’ “as it hath sundry times beene played by the Right Honourable the Earle of Pembroke, the Earle of Darbie, the Earle of Sussex, and the Lord Chamberlaine, theyre seruants, at London Printed by I. R. for Edward White and are to be solde at his shoppe at the little Northe door of Pauls, at the sign of the Gun 1600”. A copy of ‘Titus’ turned up in Sweden in 1904 that said, “first printed London 1594 and acted by the Earls of Darbie, Pembroke and Essex their servants” as the modern spelling reads. The Stationers’ Registry for publication has an entry of the play as “Feb 6, 1593”. The Lord Chamberlain’s group was not active under that name in 1593. Today it “is admitted by all…however, and will probably never be denied that Titus Andronicus has very much less merit than any other play (except perhaps the First Part of King Henry the Sixth)” but in its time at least four acting companies found it very popular, possibly for the same reason that the theatre goers liked Thomas Kyd’s ‘Jeronimo’. Ben Jonson wrote in the introduction to his ‘Bartholomew Fair’ (1614): “Hee that will sweare Ieronimo or Andronicus are the best playes, yet, shall passe vnexpected at, here, as a man whose Iudgement shewes it as constant, and hath stood still, these five and twentie or thirtie yeares”.

Since the Henry VI plays were written after the originals but before 1593, William, who was never an actor or member of ‘the Lord Chamberlain his servaunts’, could not have written the two parts for them.

However, this places ‘William’s age at 30 in 1594 when ‘The Lord Chamberlain his servants’ “secured his services exclusively”, but this is the age of the man from Stratford whom only later biographers assumed was the author taking the sparse word of Rowe in 1700 who heard it from Betterton who trusted the word of Sir William D’Avenant who liked to think that he was the son of the Man from Stratford whom he only assumed was the author of the Plays.

The same proposition is forwarded for ‘Titus’ in that ‘William’ wrote this together with Marlowe and Greene in 1587 9 ! In these suggestions of ‘co authorship’, several references appear as to ‘William’ being “the youngest of the co authors”, or that in excelling his ‘elders’, “the Lord Chamberlain’s Servants securing it as well as the services of the youngest of its authors, exclusively for themselves”. Whether in London or not, William of Stratford, if this is to whom they refer, was but two months younger than Marlowe and the two were only four years younger than Greene and six years younger than Peele or Lodge, and in 1590, the differences in their ages are not worth mentioning as Peele would have been 32, Greene near the end of his career at 30, and Marlowe at 26, but all of them would have had years of recognized experience at writing, but it is worth mentioning the age of ‘William’ when the evidence of this authorship of any of these early plays of 1589 to 1593 lacks any verifiable support except for the mention of ‘Stratford’ in the Folio.

Yet Meres makes no mention of the three ‘Henry VI’ plays and nowhere does he explain upon which evidence he credits these and the hundreds of other works to dozens of authors.

The ‘internal’ evidence, as with the three Henry VI plays, is again divided in the opinion of examiners which “leaves us in the same position in which we are as to the First Part of Henry the Sixth: that is, each reader has his own right of private judgement”.

An examiner has pointed to the three or four instances of similarity between ‘Titus’ and other works that apply only to the ‘First Part of Henry VI’ and ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, two plays that some examiners have suggested again a co authorship among ‘William’, Greene and Marlowe, “Almost without a doubt”, the commentator claims, and to ‘Venus and Adonis’ ! ‘Titus’ is a ‘revenge play’ that was popular in the early years, 1587, and was introduced by Marlowe’s ‘Jew of Malta’, Kyd’s ‘Spanish Tragedy’ also called ‘Jeronimo’, Webster’s ‘Duchess of Malfi’ and Marston’s ‘Antonio and Mellida’. ‘Hamlet’ is a revenge play that is most popular today and Kyd also wrote a ‘Hamlet’ that is lost. This type is supposed to be derived from the Senecan tragedy. It has also been suggested that ‘Titis’ is the first revenge play to introduce a new type of character that is the figure of ‘Aaron’ in ‘Titus’ which heralds the more complicated Othello, Iago, Shylock and Richard III, therefore, by this observation, “The author of Titus Andronicus fairly dripped Shakespeare”. This conclusion comes from figuring back from the fully developed works and characters in later plays and finding earlier embryo types of similar characters or styles and claiming them as having the ‘quality of Shakespeare’ However, a similar but more solidly established kinship can be found in ‘Marlowe’s hand’ because it is known that Marlowe definitely wrote certain plays. His ‘Jew of Malta’ is similar to Shylock, the character of Gloster has the exact same cadence as that of Richard III. Titus Andronicus, another Pembroke produced play, is close in title to two now lost plays that were recorded in the theatre diary of Phillip Henslowe who also had produced Marlowe plays. The diary lists ‘Tittus Vaspacia’ as being marked ‘ne’ for ‘new’ on April 11, 1591 and acted by Lord Strange’s Men and several times repeated in May and June.

The Henslowe diary also lists a ‘Titus and Ondronicus’ on January 23, 1594.

The play ‘King John’, included in the Folio, was founded on a play by an ’unknown’ author, ‘The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England’, with the earliest known edition published in 1591 and possibly written in 1587. The title page of this edition is without an author’s name although a later edition in 1611 is printed with ‘written by W. Sh.’ and on the 1622 Quarto with ‘W. Shakespeare’, six years after William Shaxper’s lifetime. There is no evidence of the revised Folio version before its 1623 publication. Frances Meres, in 1598, listed a ‘King John’ as being credited to ‘William S’ but there is no way to know that he wasn’t referring to ‘The Troublesome Raigne of John’ as it was falsely credited as “written by W. Sh” in 1611.Richard II was a dangerous subject for anyone to write about publicly while Queen Elizabeth was alive. She was constantly on guard against being deposed and ‘Richard II’ was a tale of deposition. While perusing the Rolls in the presence of the Keeper of the Records in the Tower, Elizabeth, upon fingering the pages of Richard’s reign, said to the Keeper, “I am Richard II, know ye not that ?” Any allusion to Richard was looked upon with disfavour, yet, as Francis Bacon noted, several works on the deposing of Richard persistently came “upon the stage and into print in Queen Elizabeth’s time”. For publishing a mere history of it in 1599, Haywarde was brought before the Star Chamber, imprisoned and “barely escaped a state prosecution”. Samuel Daniel in 1595 wrote a full account of ‘The Civil Wars between the two houses of Lancaster and York’ the first three books covering the deposition of Richard II. Before 1600 no less than three plays were written and acted that concerned the final days of Richard II. One, ‘Jack Strawe’ was mostly about the Wat Tyler rebellion, an early event. The second play is ‘Richard II’ as found in the Folio, and the third play was called ‘The Deposing of King Richard II’. It was this third play that the Earl of Essex bade his partisan friend, Sir Gilly Merrick, to arrange to have acted upon the stage on the afternoon before his insurrection in 1601, and it is not the play that biographers say was produced that day, the ‘Richard II’ of the Folio, another totally false legend that was invented with elaborate details of how members of the Burbadge company were involved in this plot to muster support for the rebelling Essex the following day and the allusion supplied of how the life of ‘William’ was thus placed in great danger and the impression given that ‘William’ was present and took part in the financial discussion between the actors and the nobles. The actors wanted forty shillings extra as compensation for substituting a play that would have to be rehearsed anew and they knew that the play would not draw a crowd.

Some examiners have concluded that ‘William’ revised these plays after 1594 making it contemporary with ‘Richard III’ and ‘Lucrece’, that the “two characters of Aaron and King Richard (have) many points of similarity and even agreement in the expression of the two plays and the poem having definite points of contact” and that “the resemblances between certain features of the plot of Titus Andronicus and that of Lucrece is at once apparent”, also that several instances of similarity of expression appear between ‘Titus Andronicus’ and ‘Venus and Adonis’“Once more it is clear that the trend of late investigation and criticism in the cast of all these early plays, the three Henry VI plays and to Richard III, is to find more and more evidence of the hand of the master himself though still a comparative beginner in his art working in lines then current and popular.” …but which ‘Master’s Hand’ ?

In determining which of these three plays was written first, the critics are more interested in whether one came before ‘Richard II’ of the Folio, but no, ‘Richard II’ follows closely only to the incidents and order of the ‘Holinshed Chronicles’, but in further examination, the comparison to Samuel Daniel’s ‘The First Fowre Bookes of the civile warres betweene the two houses of Lancaster and York’ is more than subject similarity. Daniel’s four book account is a poem that came out in two editions in the same year of 1595. The second edition was a complete revision of the first with most of it changed by omissions, rewriting and some entirely new stanzas included. Only the new sections bear a resemblance to the play ‘Richard II’. Some critics interpret this as fixing the date of the first production of ‘Richard II on stage just after the printing of Daniel’s first edition but before the second edition that contained many similarities to ‘Richard II’.

Daniel, then, the critics claim, was influenced by the appearance of the play on the stage. That Daniel, upon seeing the play upon the stage, but having no printed copy in his hand, proceeded, after having published his work already that year, to re write an entire four volume work of verse stanzas to change his entire viewpoint in the Richard II sections and have it completed in time to re publish it in the same year, even if the publications were eleven months apart is Notincredulous.onlyisthis conclusion assigned to Daniel not only a Herculean if not impossible task but it is an insult to Daniel. The implication that Daniel needed a play to change his viewpoint to a four-volume poem that he had already researched, written and published and that he chose to rewrite the entire work, as hardly a stanza remained unchanged, to encompass a viewpoint that he could not find for himself, is to demean the genius of Daniel, a meticulous writer from Magdelen Hall, Oxford, who often revised and republished his works; who had produced his book of sonnets to ‘Delia’ in 1592, before the ‘Venus and Adonis’, and at the age of 28 was tutor to William Herbert, the ten year old Third Earl of Pembroke. This is the same Earl of Pembroke who is still identified with the ‘W, H.’ to whom, as the encyclopaedia still erroneously states, “William Shakespeare inscribed his sonnets”. ‘William’ inscribed nothing as the inscriber was the publisher Thomas Thorpe. This is the same Third Earl of Pembroke to whom, along with his brother Phillip, the Fourth Earl of Pembroke and First Earl of Montgomery, the Folio of 1632 was dedicated. Herbert supported with his great wealth several artists and playwrights of this time including Ben Jonson and Phillip Massinger. ‘William’ was not among them. ‘The Earl of Pembroke his servants’, the company for which Marlowe wrote at least one play, was disbanded in 1593 and so their patron would have been the Second Earl of Pembroke, William Herbert’s father.The date of Samuel Daniel’s two publications of this poem is known, 1595. The date of the play ‘Richard II’ is not known. Since “The poem and the play in question have several passages so similar in thought and language is to argue that one of the authors must have drawn from the other”, it is more logical to say that the play followed the large four volume work and that the author of the play used both Holinshed and Daniel as source books in the sense that all the plays were written from source-books and does not imply stealing from it as would be construed if Daniel had hastily changed his mind from seeing the play on stage.

Two Quarto editions of ‘Richard II’ were printed in 1597 and 1598 but in 1608, five years after the death of Elizabeth, a third edition appeared with “New additions of the Parliament Scene and the deposing of King Richard” that were absent in the previous editions. Were these missing 156 lines written in the original but excised in stage presentations as well as in the printed editions ? It is supposed that at least in the printing there was good cause to omit them in 1597.

A papal bull was issued in 1596 by Pope Clement VIII that exhorted Elizabeth’s subjects to depose her, and since “Shakespeare was too prudent to write what he knew would be suppressed”, this is given as another reason why ‘Richard II’ must have been produced first in 1595, the year before the papal bull. ‘Richard II’, as well as ‘Richard III’, shows the influence of Marlowe but while ‘Richard III’ is after Marlowe’s earlier manner in having a violent character as the protagonist, ‘Richard II’ shows the later influence of the quieter and more artistic ‘Edward II’ of Marlowe. The Master was improving his art but which Master ?

Not one dramatist, including the two who are now claimed by a twentieth century biographer to have co written with the ‘Master W.S.’, has ever claimed that he had known a ‘William Shakespeare’ or ever to have seen him from afar. Yet, those biographers realize that the name of ‘W.S.’ was never seen by any one until the name was recorded in the Stationers Office in the fall of the year 1593 and that Marlowe ‘died’ on June 30 of that year.

The discovery of ‘The Sanders Portrait’ claimed to be an early portrait of ‘William Shakespeare’ and therefore of the ‘Man from Stratford’, William Shaxper, came upon the scene in May of 2001 and a book was published later called ‘Shakespeare’s Face’, by ‘Stephanie Nolen et al’ with 365 pages at the price of $39.95 telling the story of the picture along with essays by the ‘experts Shakespearean scholars, historians and art historians’.

THE SANDERS PORTRAIT Robert J. Meyer

4. Why would D’Avenant have chosen the ‘Chandos Portrait’ to be his ‘father’ if the ‘Sanders’ were known as it is supposed to have been painted from life in 1603 and to have been known among the actors of the company of the Burbadges ?

5. Why was the ‘Sanders’ never revealed as being of ‘S’ throughout the search for material by the Shakespeare Society of London in the mid 19th century, or at any other time since as the portrait’s value would have been phenomenal ?

The owner of the portrait, Lloyd Sullivan, seemingly revealed the existence of the portrait where it had been ‘concealed’ in the ‘closet of a retired engineer in southern Ontario’. Sullivan ‘inherited the painting from his mother’ and it had been in the family for ‘many years’.

The book, ‘Shakespeare’s Face’, by Stephanie Nolen and others is reviewed by Philippa Sheppard in the Globe and Mail, July 6, 2002 from which all quotations are taken. In the book, it is claimed that the Sanders portrait is “the only portrait of William Shakespeare painted from life”.

1. Why was it not used for the 1623 publication of the ‘Shakespeare Plays’ only twenty years after the claimed date of this painting in 1603 whether or not the publishers considered the ‘Stratford Man’ to be the ‘Shakespeare’ or not ?

These are only questions of authenticity. Is this a portrait of the ‘Shakespeare’ who is generally considered to be, but falsely, the Man from Stratford ? The more important nine questions of logic are:

8. Why would the Sanders family keep the picture and not the family of the man in the picture whoever he is, particularly if the portrait was commissioned as is claimed it was by ‘S’ ?

2. The picture of 1603 has no resemblance to the large ‘bust’ in the Stratford Church formed only 13 years later’ from a death mask of the Man from Stratford Why ?

9. The name on the label on the back is spelled ‘Shakspere’, which ‘Sanders’ would have known not to be the spelling on the Quartos if Sanders were an actor in the company, and this was not the spelling of the Stratford Man’s name if the portrait was of the author of the Plays ?

6. Why would not the Stratford family of Shaxper be aware of the painting if the Man from Stratford had several sittings if he were the ‘S’ of the ‘Plays’ ? If they had ever seen the portrait, any member would have known that it was not of their ‘Will’. If it were of their ‘Will’, why did they not claim it ?

3. Why would not the Sanders family who owned it complain when the 1623 Folio edition of the Plays showed the Droeshout drawing to be ‘S’ which was in the twentieth century found to be from an exact tracing of a portrait of Elizabeth I ?

7. Why would it not be in the possession of the Stratford family 13 years later at the Stratford Man’s death as he was known never to have given away or to have sold anything that he owned ?

The immediate questions are ‘Is the portrait what it claims to be the face of Shakespeare ? was it painted by John Sanders ? was he a member of the same acting company as is claimed for Shakespeare ? was it painted in 1603 or near that time ?

It looks nothing like the other two ‘verified’ images that are not the most ideal semblances for the idolized ‘Bard’. The choice of William D’Avenant, the actor producer of plays in London after the Restoration, to represent both his father and ‘Shakespeare’ whom he claimed were one and the same, was the ‘Chandos’ portrait that he produced from only he knows where as being the ideal for the great Playwright.

Which of the proposed paintings are ‘real’, meaning that they are portraits either of the Man from Stratford or of someone else whom ‘his contemporaries’ knew to be the author of Macbeth ? The ‘Flower’ is an obviously a copy of the ‘Droeshout’, the illustration that turned up in time to be printed in the 1632 collection of the Plays and which is not a painting but an engraving. Someone does not ‘sit’ for an engraving that must be from a painting or a well detailed drawing for which the subject must pose at length. So where is the original painting or drawing from which the engraving was made? No painting or drawing was made as the head and its features in the Droeshout have been proven recently to have been made originally from an exact tracing of a particular portrait of Queen Elizabeth I. Where is the original ‘Droeshout’ engraving ? Was it not worthy to have been kept at a University or was it known to be only what it was, a last minute illustration needed to put a face on the name ‘Shakespeare’, of whom no likeness in pen or paint was ever made.

Why did no one ever mention this portrait ? If John Sanders were a member actor, the others would have known of the portrait. Yet no one has referred to any painting of ‘William Shakespeare’ of whom no one has ever mentioned in ‘his’ lifetime or that the name was the name of someone whom they knew personally. Did Sanders ever paint anyone else ?

Anyone capable of painting a portrait of a living person to this degree of proficiency would have painted others. He painted no other actor’s portrait, not even the great Richard Burbadge. If he did, where are they ?

The Droeshout and the Stratford ‘bust’ are not the ‘two images’ ‘verified by those who knew him’ if ‘him’ is the author, ‘William Shakespeare’. The ‘bust’ is not a bust which is ‘a piece of statuary representing the human head, shoulders and chest’ as this statuary has arms and is assumed to be ‘verified’ as the likeness of William Shaxper of Stratford by that man’s family as the face was made from a death mask of that citizen, but there is no documented ‘verification’ although the artist is known. The death mask governed the shape and features of the face and head. His other proportions for the remainder of the statue are presumably those of the Stratford Man or the figure would not have been approved or purchased by the man’s immediate family and would not have been placed high in the church wall.

“Nolen...tells the story of the portrait and of the gallery of other portraits of Shakespeare (both real and fake) and his contemporaries.”

The ‘modern viewers’, those seeing the actual portrait today, are looking at a portrait which they have been informed is the likeness of ‘William Shakespeare’, the man who wrote the Plays, painted by a ‘fellow actor’ who had to know him personally as this portrait is ‘painted from life’. Why, then, would the viewers not prefer this to any others ?

“The face [in the Sanders] is attractive, lively, engaging, so much more appropriate, modern viewers feel, as an image of the great playwright than the well known ‘egghead’ of the Droeshout engraving, or the ‘pork butcher’ of the Stratford ‘bust’, the one image of Shaksper that were verified by those who knew him.”

The owners after D’Avenant are well documented but he never revealed the shop or attic where he discovered his ‘father’. It is never stated in any biography that the ‘Chandos’ ever received the research for authenticity that has the Sanders.

The only document that includes ‘Shakespeare’ as a shareholder in the company is one that lists that name among others who had shares in the company and performed at the Burbadge theatre but this paper was later proved to be a forgery which should have been obvious from the beginning as it mentions others who are known never to have been members.

The forged paper also states that they played at the Blackfriars theatre during a time, 1603, when the company never played there as it was used only by boy actors and who were favourites of Queen Elizabeth. Another document claims that the company was paid thus much monies and lists the name Shakespeare as one of those who were paid by the Queen, but this document was found to be issued long after the stated date ‘to make amends’. The only instance where the name Shakespeare does appear as being an actor is in the publication of Jonson’s plays but this was long after 1616 when the Stratford Man died and close to the time when this legend began.

This is easily answered as whoever the Author was could not wear the King’s livery as only those of the acting company during the reign of James wore it on special occasions.

“...the date painted on its surface, 1603, is likely accurate. We still do not know the identities of the artist or the sitter. All we have is Sullivan’s assurance that the family have for generations contended that their ancestor, John Sanders, a bit-part actor, painted his acquaintance, William Shakespeare.”

The Droeshout cannot be assumed to be ‘verified by those who knew him’ as not all of the people responsible for the publishing of the edition are known. Ben Jonson is supposed to have had prior knowledge of the publication as the plays that he wrote are compiled as the first collection of plays in English to be produced. However, there is no document to say that Jonson or any member of the group of publishers, not the printers, verified that the Droeshout was a likeness of ‘Shakespeare’ and least of all that it was a likeness of the Man from Stratford for there is no evidence whatever that any, including Jonson, knew the true identity of the author

The two actors, Heminges and Condell, were not living when their ‘statement’ was included in the 1632 edition of the Plays. If they or anyone else knew of an authentic portrait of the true ‘Shakespeare’, there would have been no necessity of concocting the Droeshout that looks like neither the Sanders nor the statue which also do not appear similar. There are numerous other portraits of ‘Shakespeare’ in editions of the Plays that can be found in second hand bookstores and they are all similar to the Chandos portrait differing only in detail but none is ever given any source, date or identification of the artist.

“Elizabethan theatre specialist Andrew Gurr argues persuasively that in 1603, Shakespeare may well have wished to be painted. King James I became patron of Shakespeare’s theatre company, which meant that Shakespeare was now a Groom of the Chamber, permitted to wear the king’sJameslivery.”VIof Scotland became patron of the company in 1603 when he ascended the throne as James I of England and the members of the company wore at times new livery to represent their new patron but there is no document to verify that the author, ‘Shakespeare’, was a member of the company. All biographies state that ‘he was a Groom of the Chamber’ but only on the premise that he was member of the company who were Grooms of the Chamber automatically.

If Shakespeare were a member and was permitted to wear the king’s livery, a very special honour, and, as the theatre specialist suggests, would have wanted to be painted for this reason in 1603, and if the Sanders is his portrait, why was he not painted dressed in the King’s livery ?

The wills of true members of the Players company have never shown any mention of ‘castoffs’ from any patron of the company as many much humbler possessions are mentioned in their wills.Thequotation

“Shakespeare seems always to have acted with great prudence, even stinginess, in financial matters. It is hard to imagine him throwing away money on faddish garments, especially when he was intent on fitting into a new class.”

Assuming that the date ‘1603’, is correct, the Stratford Man would be 39, post April 1603. The portrait is not similar to any other proposed portrait and is far from the face of the statue, demeaned as the face of a pork butcher, but still taken from his death mask and verified by his family as their William Shaxper.

from Thomas Platter, a visitor to London of 1599, says that he witnessed that “the players are most extravagantly and richly dressed”. So are the players at the Theatres at Stratford but they do not own them. Platter was not describing street clothes of the players.

“Gurr provides evidence both from Shakespeare’s life (his petition for a coat of arms) and works (the sonnets) that he found his low social standing painful, and would have rejoiced enough in his new status to have it commemorated in paint.”

“However, Nolen answers some of these challenges by pointing out that actors wore their patrons’ castoffs, and quoting Thomas Platter, a visitor to London in 1599 from Basel, who recorded that ‘the players are most extravagantly and richly dressed.”

If John Sanders were a ‘bit part actor’ he is an actor and in all professional acting groups then and now all acted parts regardless of their size, a walk on one day and a greater part tomorrow. John Sander’s name does not appear among the many actors still documented today.

Any indication that the Stratford Man is not the author will still not imply that the Sanders portrait is not of the ‘real’ ‘Shakespeare’ but if it is of the ‘real’ man, the famous Bard who sat for this portrait, would he not have purchased it ? Why would it be in the possession of the family of the artist Sanders ?

This ‘petition’ concerned the Stratford family of William Shaxper and so has no relation to this portrait now claimed to be the Author the Plays. William the son ordered a ‘petition’ to be filed for John the father as he himself could not write. Neither desired a self portrait. If the sonneteer wished a portrait, he would have paid to sit for one. Biographies mislead when they give the notion that it was by William Shaxper for himself and suppositions such as this are based on that misconception. The father could not write and although he was a wool merchant, he was also a member of the local town administration in more than one station for many years. A citizen had to have a more prominent station in life than a dealer in wool before being eligible for a coat of arms. If the son, making the petition for the father, was the famous playwright, why did he not petition for himself ?

Since actors wore the ‘castoffs’ of the patrons, they also wore the ‘castoffs’ of previous patrons, not those of ‘James I his servauntes’ on official events. No such livery was ever found at the Stratford Man’s large house. Nor was such livery handed out to friends in his will, nor recorded in the will to his nearest relatives. From what the will describes, he never sold anything that he ever owned, and he never bequeathed any to a friend or relative any shares in any company of players and no document exists that he ever sold any shares in any company of players. This applies to Shaxper and if the Great Poet was some other person, that man would still not have worn this livery as whomever the Great Poet was, he was not an actor in any group.

Several extensive articles appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail on the subject of the ‘Sanders Portrait’ from May 11 to August of 2001. The article ‘Seeking John Sanders’ appeared on July“Sir10.Roy

Further evidence that the Stratford Man was not even suspected as being the Author of the Plays before the Folio is that in seeking a picture to represent ‘Shakespeare’ to be published in the Folio, no one was commissioned to go to Stratford, to go into the Church or to paint a fine portraiture of the statue or to make even a drawing or a sketch for an engraving.

The correct title of this play was ‘The Return from Parnassus’, not ‘to’.

Strong, former chief curator of the National Portrait Gallery in London and an expert on portraits from the Elizabethan and Jacobean era, also considers it quite possible. [that Shakespeare would have had his portrait painted] He noted a line from a play entitled The Return to Parnassus, an anonymous student work written in about 1599 and performed at Cambridge University: ‘Oh Sweet Master Shakespeare. I’ll have his picture in my study at the Court’.”

This Parnassus quotation is known only because someone searching for extremely rare references to ‘Shakespeare’ before 1616 came across this obscure text of a play. The quotation is from one of the speeches of one of the players so it is remarkable that Sir Roy and so many others take this literally rather than for what it is, an invented line for a fictitious character in a play that was for farcical laughs as is obvious when read in context. Why anyone would take the fictitious line of the character as referring to an actual ‘picture’ is the proper question, and from that to remark that ‘obviously’ pictures of a living author were ‘going around’ is quite amazing.

The six known signatures are all very difficult to decipher particularly for the letters after ‘k’ in any of the six claimed signatures, which is all of the ‘writing’ of Shaxper ever found.

“‘Obviously pictures of Shakespeare were going around,’ Sir Roy said.”

What do they believe these dozens of pictures were, sketches, cartoons or oil paintings ? In the student farce, man y were claimed to have ‘his picture under their pillow’. No one knows of any pictures ‘going around’ at that time, but a line in an obscure play seems to be all that is needed to convince so many. The original play is a sophomoric skit making jest about the current rage over the newly published ‘Sonnets’ attributed to a ‘William Shakespeare’ of whom they had never heard and the popularity of which soon afterwards fizzled out as there were no more reprints.

If this is referring to the Man from Stratford, Shaxper never wrote his name that ‘often’ much less spelling it in one manner ‘often’.

“A small piece of paper affixed to the back of the painting bears these words: ‘Shakspere (as the poet himself often spelled his name)...”

William Shaxper and members of his family are witnessed to spell the name as it sounded as all people did at that time. Someone else might spell a person’s name differently but it was always pronounced the same way, ‘Shax per’, shacks per, never ‘Shake speer’.

This ‘new class’ refers again to the ‘petition for a coast of arms’ that was for father John Shaxper of Stratford which was ultimately denied, and his son, William Shaxper, didn’t need any coat-of-arms as he enjoyed being the richest man in Stratford with more than any of his many rich predecessors.TheStratford Man was prudent to the point of being very stingy, as described by the bequests he made in his will and he also could not be imagined as paying for a portrait as he had none painted even though he bought the biggest house in the town of Stratford but also because it was once owned by the richest man in Stratford whom he strove to imitate and then to succeed.

“Only the bust on William Shakespeare’s grave in Stratford and an engraving for the cover of his first collection of plays both done after his death are agreed among most authorities to be actual likenesses.”

done by the artist Martin Droeshout for the frontispiece of the First Folio of this plays, which seems to have been taken from a sketch that has never been found. The engraving, too, seems to have been approved by Anne Hathaway.”

People did not spell ‘any old way’ as many people assume today. Different spellings have the same sound. Shacksper and Shaxper were pronounced the same way. Shackspere was not pronounced ‘Shake-spear’ but as ‘Shax-per’. The ending ‘e’ was not pronounced nor did it indicate to harden the vowel preceding as it does today when ‘at’ becomes ‘ate’ by adding the final ‘e’. This ‘rule’ is not consistent as there are numerous exceptions to the modern ‘rule’. The Man from Stratford and members of his family always sounded their name ‘Shaks per’ and adding the final ‘e’ did `not make it ‘peer’. If those printing the Quartos knew the author’s name was pronounced ‘Shax per’, they would not have printed it as ‘Shake speare’.

The Droeshout engraving in the Folio is the furthest in likeness to the bust, a since proven outline from a portrait of Elizabeth I. Further in the article: “...the bust on…Shakespeare’s grave…” is obviously incorrect as the statuary is high on the side wall of the church, not ‘on his tomb’ or ‘grave’ which is under the floor along with that of his wife ‘MostAnne.authorities’

may agree that both the engraving and the statuary are ‘actual likenesses’ but who upon glancing at pictures of both could agree that they are likenesses ‘actual’ or not ? They are not even similar to each other and no one knows whether they are likenesses to ‘Shakespeare’ for no one has seen a verified portrait.

The statuary received the approval of the Stratford Man’s family or it would not be there, but if anyone verified the engraving as being the man they knew to be Shakespeare, it is not the Stratford“AndMan.aprint

“ ..the eccentric spelling of his name was first recorded on the poet’s own will which he signed ‘Shakspere’. It is another clue, Mr. Foster believes, that the inscription was added after his death.”There is nothing eccentric in Shakspere’s spelling of his own name. Outlandish is Foster’s opinion that ‘the inscription was added’ to the back of the Sanders portrait after ‘his death’. because of the ‘eccentric’ spelling when it is admitted that this is the manner in which it was spelled on Shakspere’s will and it is amazing that Foster finds it obvious that the ‘attribution’, which is the label, ‘wasn’t made in Shakespeare’s lifetime’ and that it is obvious that the label had to be ‘added after his death’ since that date is on the label and particularly because he is hailed as ‘an expert in orthography [correct spelling]’. Does he not know Elizabethan spelling ? Under the title, “Is this the face of genius ?”, by the reporter and author of the book, “Shakespeare’s Face”, appears in the Toronto Globe and Mail on May 11, 2001.

In the article, ‘Portrait’s subject may not be Bard, U.S. scholar says’, (May 18, 2001, National“DonaldPost):Foster, a Shakespearean scholar and an expert in orthography [spelling] at Vassar College...” says, “‘Basically, the orthography there is entirely modern’, he said in an interview from Vassar.” “‘That doesn’t say anything at all, of course, about when the portrait was painted. But it’s obvious to me that the attribution wasn’t made in Shakespeare’s lifetime.’”

“Alexander Leggatt, professor of English at the University of Toronto, said Shakespeare would certainly have been well known in theatrical circles by 1603...”

This supposition, as so many others are in biographies, is based upon the other suppositions that the man who wrote the plays was ‘an actor’, ‘a director’, ‘a speech coach’, ‘a shareholder in the Chamberlain’s Men’, ‘an owner of the theatre company’, ‘a re writer of old plays’, all of which appear as ‘no doubt he was...’ suppositions in various biographies. There is no evidence that he was any of these except in a proven forgery that he was a ‘shareholder’ from which came all the other suppositions. No artist in oil would paint ‘from memory’ as if he could there would be no necessity for a ‘sitting’ and it would not require ‘seeing him every day’ to ‘memorize the face’ if this were possible.

Another Stephanie Nolen article is published in the Globe and Mail on the following day, May 12, 2001. Alexander Leggatt is quoted on the Sanders portrait: “The image does not look dissimilar to the man in the Folio engraving, he noted speculating that the image for the engraving, its source long unknown, might in fact have been taken from this picture, or that both were based on an even earlier, now lost, portrait.”

When there is no evidence, speculation is wide open since any documentation is ‘lost’.

“If the inscription on the back of the painting is to believed, Mr. Sanders got Shakespeare to sit still for a day of two in 1603, or perhaps painted him from memory, having seen him at the theatre each day.”

From the August 4, 2001, a review of Stephanie Nolen’s book, ‘Shakespeare’s Face’, by Hans Werner (Toronto Star): “The Droeshout portrait is an idealized one done after Shakespeare’s death, but it was endorsed by the Bard’s protégé and later rival, Ben Jonson, who at least took it as a passable likeness.”

The Stratford Man’s wife, Anne, died in 1623 prior to the time that the First Folio was printed. That she approved the engraving to say that it was the likeness of her husband is not in any biography on the library shelves. There is no evidence whatever that anyone connected the name on the Quartos of the plays with the existence of the Stratford Man before 1616 when he died or before 1623 when the Folio was printed. Of the Sanders portrait: “It shows a Shakespeare with fluffy red hair and blue green eyes, an appearance that matches descriptions of him in the journals of his contemporaries Christopher Marlowe and FrancisThereBacon.”isno mention of this in any biography of ‘Shakespeare’ and this is the first mention of any ‘journal of Christopher Marlowe’ or ‘of Francis Bacon. There is no mention of ‘Shakespeare’ the man and certainly not a description of the man by anyone living before 1616, including Bacon. Marlowe is said to have been killed in the spring of 1593 before the first mention anywhere of the name ‘Shakespeare’, in the Fall of 1593 in the Register’s Office required before the publishing of any work viewed only by the registrar.

The ‘name’ only of Shakespeare was most certainly not ‘well known’ by 1603 having appeared on the publications of two long poems and a very few plays in Quarto but of a person there is no mention anywhere. If he were a person in London, there would have been no necessity for a tax debt billed to a ‘Shakspere’ that was sent to three addresses and finally marked by a comment paraphrased as ‘not found’ and ‘must have left the city’ at the height of the name’s supposed ‘popularity’. The ‘tax bill’ was never sent to any theatre.

This is from Anthony B. Dawson, professor of English, University of B.C. (Globe and Mail, May 16, 2001) How many undocumented statements does Prof. Dawson claim to be true that are repeated from many biographers ? The answer is ‘seven’: ‘reasonable likeness’, ‘Jonson who knew Shakespeare’, ‘editors of the Folio’, ‘fellow actors’, ‘close friends’, ‘remembered in his will”, ‘would have chosen a portrait’. There is no evidence that Ben Jonson “knew Shakespeare well” as claimed in this statement. The wording in the poem cannot be the only, solitary ‘evidence’ that Ben knew William as a person or that the word ‘hit’ can be definitely construed as ‘you have captured his very likeness, lack of beard, bald pate, thin moustache, exactly as you yourself have set eyes vpon him eight year ago come Michaelmas in Stratford-vpon-Avon, when I sent you there with pen in hand to etch his countenance’. ‘John Heminge’ and ‘Henry Condell’, as the names appear in the books that include ‘The Dedication’, were not the “editors of the Folio”. The Dedication states that they were not the editors “We have but selected them, and done an office to the dead, to procure his orphans, guardiansOnly..”in modern publications of the Plays do others refer to them as ‘editors’ as in the volume, ‘Shakespeare’, introductions by Frederick D. Losey, A.M. (Harvard), Litt.D. 1926: “The editors, John Heminge and Henry Condell, had been partners with Shakespeare in the stage business and professed to print all his plays from ‘true original copies’.” These words, ‘true original copies’ do not appear in either the ‘Dedication’ or the ‘To the great variety of readers’, nor is there any reference to ‘professing to print’ plays. Rather the line reads: “to have collected and published them” and publishing is not printing.

This infers that Ben Jonson from close personal contact with the ‘Man who wrote the Plays’ knew the countenance of the man’s face. Ben Jonson never claimed that he knew the man or that he had spoken to him or had seen him on a single occasion. Only on a piece of paper found in his effects after his death in 1637 and never meant for publication was a note saying that he ‘loved the man, this side of idolatry’ but this is a love of his works, the same as he would say that he loved Socrates or Plato. He made no mention of the first name, William, or Will or Willy. Jonson was never a ‘protégé’ of ‘Shakespeare’. Tales that they knew each other appeared only long after 1637 and were usually re workings of yarns or ‘jeasts’ known long before as referring to others.Letters to the Editor followed these articles containing the usual misconceptions about the First Folio of the Plays.

Again, there is no evidence that ‘Shakespeare’, the author, was a partner in ‘the stage business’ except for the forgery that mentions the Blackfriars and that the company played there when they did not perform in the building where only boys acted.

“The much-maligned Droeshout portrait in the First Folio, printed in 1623, is certainly no great shakes as art, but it does have a good claim to being a reasonable likeness: Opposite the portrait, a short poem by Ben Jonson, who knew Shakespeare well, expresses a wish that the engraver had been able to “drawe (Shakespeare’s) wit As well in brasse, as he hath hit His face”; and the editors of the Folio, two of Shakespeare’s fellow actors who were close friends remembered in his will, would not, presumably, have chosen a portrait that had no resemblance to their friend and colleague.”

“He married his neighbour, Anne Hathaway…”

In his column in the Globe and Mail on May 11, 2001, Warren Clemens comments upon the Sanders 1603 portrait. He asks, “Who is he at this point in his life at 39, in 1603 ?”

“One of Anne and William’s twins, Hamnet, died in 1596 and the other, Judith, is not quick.”This is news. Under the various meanings of ‘quick’, Judith was quick (living the original meaning). She was quick (pregnant giving birth to three sons).

The Burbadges were the owners and proprietors of their company from the beginning, not ‘Shakespeare’, and they remained operating under several patrons. The father, James, and the sons, Richard and Cuthbert, spelled their name with a ‘d’.

“His first child, Sara, is making her way in the world and will marry a doctor four years from now.”

William(1603)ofStratford’s first child was named Susanna.

There is no evidence to say that she was not ‘prompt to understand’ or not ‘sharp in discernment’, two other meanings of ‘quick’. It is said that she could not read and A.L. Rowse describes her therefore as “ignorant”.

To estimate the answer, he must have read one of the ‘biographies’ of Shakespeare that all contain some bits of information found in archives in Stratford, a few London contemporary events and much speculation as to what he, ‘no doubt’, must have done with no evidence on which to found it. “He has made a good living since the hardscrabble days of teaching school and acting on the road.”Noevidence exists for these statements. These are the imaginations of biographers, mostly in the 20th century to fill in all of the multitudinous blanks between true scraps of documents sought and found by one member of the Shakespeare Society. The documents concern onl y the man, William of Stratford who was not an author.

Ben Jonson’s hand is evident in all of the wording for the First Folio introductions, both ‘To the Readers’ and ‘Dedication’. They are not the phrases of the actors. They had no hand in it and knew nothing about them. These introductions were added to the 1632 Folio long after both Condell and Heminges had died but when Jonson was still living. Heminges always spelled his name with the final ‘s’, another indication that he never knew about the Dedication and ‘To the readers’ and that they never wrote them. The name is spelled ‘Heminge’ ever since 1632 copying the Folio. The name ‘Burbage’ also is spelled thus only long after 1632

Other poets chafed that there was no money in writing plays, only acting in plays paid them. So the biographers made ‘William’ an actor. The Stratford man was a money lender and there is documented evidence of this and that this is his source of fortune.

THE SECOND FOLIO OF 1632 Robert J. Meyer

“After Burbage’s death, Heminges and Condell were the leading men in Shakespeare’s Company and they gallantly dedicated themselves to producing a folio volume of all his plays ‘only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare.”

From “William Shakespeare A Biography”, 1963 by A.L. Rowse, P456:

Rowse says ‘Shakespeare’s Company’ with a capital ‘C’ to further imply that the acting company belonged at one time to William as he was supposed to have ‘retired from the company in 1609’. Neither ‘William Shaxper’ or ‘William Shake-spear’ had any connection, member of owner, to any acting company, and they did not own ‘shares’, as claimed by biographers and announced in the Blackfriars forgery. To say that Heminges and Condell were ‘the leading men’ in the company in 1623 is unreasonable speculation as there were almost none of the rest of the company still living and no one knows who were ‘leading men’ While Heminges and Condell were living in 1623, the year of the First Folio, neither man was living in 1632, the year of the Second Folio and it is the Second Folio only that contained ‘their tribute’ to the Author and the mention of ‘your Stratford moniment’ in a poem by Leonard Digges that began the belief that Stratford’s ‘Wllm Shaxper’ was the Author. Rowe must have known these details, yet he credits Heminges and Condell with ‘producing a folio volume of all his plays’ which would include their ‘collecting’ only those 36 plays and acting as the Folio’s ‘publishers’ which is taking them to the print Rowseshopisfollowing what is printed in the second Folio of 1632, a preface called ‘To the great variety of readers’ where, over the names of ‘Heminge and Condell’ the two former actors claim, “We have but collected them and done the office of the dead…” and doing “that the Author himself had lived to have set forth, and overseen his own writings”, that is to take the plays to the printer. The ‘Author’ never took any play to the printer before but they claim that he would have done so

It is claimed that Heminges and Condell headed the King’s Men at the funeral of King James in 1625 but that, too, may be someone’s imagination as they were old men at that time or they did march but were no longer acting in the King’s Men. Rowse does not mention that he is only quoting the two actors from ‘their’ ‘Dedication’ placed originally in the 1632 Folio long after Condell had died in 1627 and Heminges in 1630.

In some biographies of ‘William’ it is stated that ‘John Heminge and Henry Condell “took a number of plays to the publishers in 1632 to be titled ‘The Works of William Shakespeare, the names of the Principall Actors in all these Plays”.. That never happened. Why was the year 1632 chosen ? It was sixteen years after 1616, the year that William of Stratford died but until 1632, there had been no mention made of anyone in Stratford being the author of these plays, but it was also the first year after most of the principal actors of the Burbadge group of players had died. Of those actors who were listed in the production of Ben Johnson’s ‘Every Man in His Humor, 1598’, and as mentioned in the 1596 petition and members of the King’s servants, William Kempe died in 1603, Thomas Pope 1604, Augustine Philips 1605, William Sly 1608, Robert Armin 1615, Richard Burbadge 1619, and Nicholas Tooley, 1623. Only John Heminges and Henry Condell and two or three others were left after 1623 Anne Hathaway Shaksper died on August 8, 1623, and three months later the First Folio was printed November 8, 1623. Philip Henslowe who had produced some of the plays had died. Only his son in law, Edward Alleyn, the leading actor in the plays of Marlowe was living but he had retired to his Manor at Dulwich and in 1623, his wife died. He married again a few months later and he died in 1626.

“To handle such a large volume a small syndicate of stationers came together: it seems the Jaggards and Edward Blount, Marlowe’ old friend, were the chief undertakers, joined by John Smethwick and William Apsley who both possessed rights in a number of the plays. These are the names given of those at whose charges the volume was printed.” A.L. Rowse P457.

By which means did Smethwick and Apsley attain “rights’ in the number of plays” ? Nothing is mentioned of this in other biographies. Rather, it is always emphasized that little interest was taken in assigning credit to the plays, authors ‘wrote for the ear and not for the eye’, authors didn’t care if their names were printed on plays, most printed plays in quarto were ‘pirated’ or were ‘bad’ copies, acting companies only sold the plays to printers when they needed money during the plague, and now it is casually mentioned that these two men owned ‘rights’ to plays. They necessarily must have held these rights for a considerable length of time, possibly for up to thirty years by 1623.

This is correct. The Jaggards, Isaac and William, were the printers. Edward Blount was the ‘publisher’ the one who has the authority to ‘publish’ the Plays. Blount had taken some of the plays of Marlowe to the printers.

E. I. Fripp in his ‘Shakespeare’s Stratford’ asks, P857: “Where was Richard Field ? Why was he not in the undertaking ? He was high in his profession, Master of Stationers’ Company in 1619 and in 1622.” Rowse says of this: “If only we knew the story of the relations between these two Stratford men in London, their earlier association and then its complete end something interesting is lost there”. Yet, it is Rowse and others who have made much of this ‘association’ that just as easily was non existent. Rowse says, “It is clear that their acquaintance was close” after mentioning that Richard Field was the printer of ‘Venus and Adonis’. Of Fields, Rowse says, “The young printer from Stratford made a good job of his first independent publication for the first book Field printed on his own was Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie, the prime Elizabethan work of literary criticism which summed up all that had been achieved in the past thirty years and pointed the way to the future. He presented this mastery work to Lord Treasurer, Burghley, in May time of 1589, and we find that Sir John Harrington, the Queen’s godson, wished it to be taken for a model of printing of his translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. This was only two years later, in 1591, while Shakespeare was still in close association with Field and before they moved apart”.There is no implication that William was in “close association with Field” in 1591 as the name, ‘Shakespeare’, was totally unknown until it was recorded at the Registrar’s Office in the fall of 1593 and when later ‘Venus’ was printed with the name. There is no evidence that William was ever in Field’s printing shop or that they ever spoke to each other when at free school at Stratford. Field was two years older than William of Stratford. William would have entered free school at the regular age of seven in 1571. During his last two years 1577 8, Field would be under the Master Thomas Jenkins who held that post from 1575 to 1579 while William would be in the class of the Usher, Simon Hunt, during Hunt’s years from 1572 to 1574 and it is unlikely that William was still at the school at the age of 14 when Field left at the age of 16.

Although Field’s father was a tanner and William’s father was a wool merchant and glover, there is no reason to say that these boys were friends and they could have passed in the street with a mere nod or a ‘How now ?”. Although Stratford was a small community it is not certain that Field lived in the town. The name does not appear among the many Stratford residents and trades people that are mentioned in the biographies. Richard Field completed free school and was in London as an apprentice printer in 1579 at the age of sixteen.

It is certain that the publisher was John Harrison in 1593 for ‘Venus’ and in 1594 for ‘Lucrece’ and so no William was needed to enter the Field print shop nor the other print shop in 1594, so there was no ‘close association’ or a ‘moving apart’.

Richard Field was not involved with the First Folio in 1623. The Jaggards, Isaac and William, were the printers that may seem odd when it is claimed that William Jaggard ‘pirated’ sonnets and poems of ‘William’ in 1599. Of this Rowse says P148: “A group of sonnets dealing with Adonis and Venus under the name of Cytherea was pirated along with other sonnets and poems of Shakespeare by Jaggard and published in The Passionate Pilgrim. We have reason to be grateful, for otherwise they might have been lost; they must have been among the ‘sugared sonnets’ that, Meres noted, were handed round among his privateThisfriends.”‘group of sonnets’ numbered all of exactly two, and three other poems were taken from the previously printed ‘Loues labore lost’ that was published under ‘Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespeare’. So the number of poems that ‘otherwise might have been lost’ is two as the other 16 poems were by authors who were well known although Jaggard printed the 21 poems under the title ‘The Passionate Pilgrime: by W. Shakespear’. Later in 1612, Jaggard re issued ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ and included two additional poems that had been recently published and these, too, were attributed to ‘W.S.’ although these two additional poems were by Thomas Heywood who complained that the implication was that this ‘W.S.’ had claimed authorship of two poems that were not his to claim Of this F.E. Halliday says: “This looked, wrote Heywood, as though he had stolen them from Shakespeare, who ‘to do himself right’, had published them under his own name”. Of this, Rowse says P456: “As early as 1598 or 1599, Jaggard put out a small book of verse, The Passionate Pilgrim, which included five poems only of Shakespeare’s and had put his name on the title page. Thomas Heywood tells us of Shakespeare’s displeasure at this; ‘so the author I know much offended with Master Jaggard that, altogether unknown to him, presumed to make so bold with his name’. Of the poems, “he to do himself right hath since published them in is own name”.There seems to be a conflict of statements and it rests upon ‘faulty pronoun reference’, the pronoun being ‘his’, as it is unclear who ‘his’ is. Heywood is clear in saying that he, Heywood, complained that his poems being published under William’s name implied that he, Heywood, had stolen the poems from William. Halliday also says that Heywood wrote that it looked as though he, Heywood, had stolen the poems from William. Rowse, however, reads Heywood’s words incorrectly and gives the opposite impression that it appeared to William that he had stolen the poems from Heywood and this would be the first and only time that William had ever expressed an opinion on anything. Rowse confuses Heywood’s statement as Heywood never mentions William and he could not have ‘known’ William. When Heywood speaks of the ‘author’ he is referring to himself and this is clear when re reading Heywood’s statement as quoted by Rowse. Jaggard made ‘so bold with’ Heywood’s ‘name’ by not giving credit to it. However mistaken Rowse is, he still scores another point by claiming that William lived and made a statement when no one ever claimed that they has seen anyone whose name was ‘William Shakespeare’..

Rowse is imagining again, this time that ‘someone stopped’ Jaggard from publishing any further editions but he gives no evidence that Jaggard was prevented as the book could have run its course in popularity. Rowse still insists that these very few editions were printed with the name on them ‘to make his book sell’ as ‘there was no doubt of the appeal of the name’. Once again the inference is that the name sold more copies, yet there was very little with the name as the author in 1599, only ‘Venus’ and ‘Lucrece’ and not ‘Loues labore lost’. If that name sold copies, why did not ‘William’ publish ‘his own poems’. The answer or excuse is, ‘He was too busy to attend to trifles’. There were not supposed to be ‘copyrights’ at that time, yet Smethwick and Apsley are said to ‘possess rights to a number of the plays’ and thus were joint publishers of the Folio along with Edward Blount. Heminges and Condell had no part in the publishing.

Ten years later, A. L. Rowse wrote ‘Shakespeare the Man’, 1973, in which he makes similar statements regarding ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’, P180: “To go no further than 1599, in this year the publisher William Jaggard sought to recommend a miscellaneous volume he put out, The Passionate Pilgrim’, as ‘By W. Shakespeare’. He succeeded: two editions were at once called for, before somebody stopped it. Jaggard had got hold of a couple of Dark Lady sonnets, and added three more from Love’s Labour’s Lost, to help to make his book sell. In 1612, Jaggard, nothing daunted, brought out an expanded edition, using Shakespeare’s name again and that of Venus and Adonis. Whatever the copyright position, there was no doubt of the appeal of the name.”

THE SECOND FOLIO OF 1623 Robert J. Meyer

The Folio printed in 1632, is the only source that makes the statement or claim that ‘Shakespeare’ is the author of the Plays that it contains. In the Dedication printed only in the 1632 Folio, the two underwriters who seemingly sign themselves as ‘John Heminge’ and ‘Henry Condell’ do not identify the author either as their ‘fellow actor’ or as ‘William Shakespeare’, but only aws ‘our Shakespeare’. This testament does not come from two separate sources who knew who the Author was or in two independent and divergent contexts, but made jointly by two men whose association as actors with the Burbadge players, was in the same context and with the same set of circumstances in common with at least a dozen or more actors and members of the s same theatre group including the three owner managers of the company. None of the members made any statement that the man who supplied them with these Plays was anyone from Stratford or from anywhere else in the country and not one of them even hinted in any manner that they knew the individual who wrote the Plays. Only the Burbadges as managers of the company would have any authority over every aspect of the company and no actor or workman would be privy to any private information unless related to them by a Burbadge.

Historians of the theatre have stated that no play was allowed in the unsupervised possession of an actor, that the actors’ parts were handed to the individual players for the learning of their lines and then those script pages were collected at the day’s end. This infers that these pages did not contain the entire script. Historians are also adamant that in saying that these plas were closely guarded so that rival companies could not produce these plays and that they were never sold for the same reason. Only in time of ‘dire need’ were any of these future Folio plays sold to a publisher as during the long months of a plague when the theatres were closed. However, the dates of any of the Quarto version were not the dates of plague times, and although the theatres of London may be closed during plagues, the players travelled in the country side to the towns and so there was no ‘dire need’ to sell Quartos for that reason, and so this reason is another invention of those in later centuries to give ‘reasons’ for the mysteries that arose in claiming William to be the Author.

The statements of the theatre historians contain several inferences, if not outright pronouncements that the actors’ scripts were not allowed to be taken out of the theatre so that they might not be copies or stolen, implying that lines were learned only on the premises of the theatre, that the ‘actor’s copy’ contained only the lines of the actor’s part leaving it unclear whether cue lines also appeared in that copy which seems very impractical for scenes in which several characters speak sort lines. Even more complicated is the work of the scribe who had to write out all the individual actor’s copies leaving out the lines of the other parts. This cumbersome procedure is unimaginable. Such an arrangement would require private rooms for those members with the most lines or with the most complicated lines. The theatre groups in Burbadge’s time neve played the same play for to consecutive days. Possessing copies of the lines would be essential for the actors to give quick rehearsals for the upcoming play either on that day or on the day after. All of this ‘information’ about secretive scripts is an assumption of the 19th century writers repeated into the 20th century, to account for only some of the Folio plays being printed in Quarto form when the elaborate set of circumstances that when exercised would have been a cumbersome, if not impossible way for the actors to learn their lines. Since 18 of the Plays were nevertheless printed in Quarto, a further explanation had to be conceived: that permission for printing was not granted to publishers and that the Plays had to be ‘stolen’ or ‘pirated’ and two ways were forwarded as to how the Plays would then come into the hands of the publishers.

All of the printed Quartos before 1616, whether or not they were by the same author and whether or not they were credited to the name of to ‘W.S.’, the publisher’s name was often identified as well as the printer’s name.

The first evidence of the name as a playwright was in the printing of ‘Love’s Labor Lost’ in 1598 when the title page read “corrected and augmented by William Shakespeare’. Before that announcement, at least 17 plays had been written and produced on London stages that either had not been printed or, if printed, had no been credited to any author, but were credited in the 1623 Folio to ‘Shakespeare’. This circumstance had not occurred before or since. Any official record concerning the Stratford William was never public information to be known by anyone in London as cuch information was not known to anyone publicly for another 130 years.

Someone in the Audience copied down the actor’s words in performance a difficult task for anyone at that time and so this became the reason for the ‘errors’ found in the Quartos as compared to the Folio. In another method, individual actors would dictate their lines to a scribe and this wold require a ‘defecting actor’ for each part in each play printed. Now the difference between the Quarto and the Folio was then excused by the ‘the actor’s faulty memory’, but that would mean that each actor in the Play did not remember his lines. Were all of these actor’s memories that faulty, audiences on Thursday would have heard a vastly different version than those on TheseMonday.excuses

do not explain why some plays were published while others were not, and none of these ‘reasons’ seem to apply to the work of any other playwright of that day and certainl y no to Marlowe or Jonson who never complained that their printed plays were faulty. Marlowe was active in publishing his own work as was Jonson. These imagined methods of stealing plays were derived and initiated from the statements claimed to be made by ‘Heminge and Condell’ in the not ‘To the Great Variety of |Readers contained in the 16322 Folio that some of the Plays were “divers stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealth of injurious imposters that exposed them’. Once again, ‘William’ is unique, as no other playwright’s works were so stolen, maimed and deformed. As claimed by ‘Heminge and Condell’, who died before 1632, all publications of the Plays in the Quartos, including the eight that bore the name, William Shakespeare’, the only times that the name appeared on the Plays, were ‘these frauds and stealths of imposters who published‘Pirating’them’.does not explain why eight Plays were credited to William while eight were not. The only printings of the name were in reference to those eight ‘imposters’ and no one credited him with those without the name in the Quarto with the exception of one Play credited to that name in the Quarto with the exception of one Play credited to that name by Meres that did not contain the name ‘Shakespeare’ and never as either ‘Shackspere’ or ‘Shaxpeer’ as found on the documents, letters or references of or to members of the family of William of Stratford.

As early as 1595, the play ‘Locrine’ was published as ‘written by ‘W.S.’ the initials only and not identified. The initials appeared as the ‘author’ of ‘Cromwell’ in 1605 and in the reprint in 1613 and again in 1607 as the ‘author’ of ‘The Puritan’. “The London Prodigal’ was published in Quarto with the full name “William Shakespeare’ in 1605, and in 1608. ‘A Yorkshire Tragedy by W. Shak speare’ appeared. No objection or comment wa made by anyone on these credits on the Quartos. None of these plays are now recognized as being written by ‘William’ of the Folio.

The publishers were never secretive about their own identity and no objection to their printing any of these plays is noted before or after 1598. Original manuscripts to these pays re non-existent but neither are the original manuscripts to Ben Johnson’s plays but there is no parallel here as Jonson took the unprecedented aeops to have his plays printed in Folio and he may have felt that this was sufficient to preserve them. No ‘William’ of the Quartos ever published a Biographersplay. claim that no Folio was published before 616 without the ‘author’s permission’ and so the Quarto plays were ‘pirated’, which is an admission rather than a claim. Yet, these few credits in the ‘pirated’ Quartos are the only instances where the name was ever printed as a playwright. If there had been np ‘pirated’ Quarto editions, there would have been no mention of the name being linked to a playwright. The publishers of the Quartos are the ‘injurious impostors’, and to publish a Folio in 1623 claiming that a ‘William Shakespeare’ wrote them would be meaningless. As many as 17 more plays were written ove a period of 11 years, then suddenly after 1598, eleven plays ae published in two years with a name that had appeared nowhere in any context except the two poems in 1593 194 while half of the plays are now considered to be written by the same author, yet other plays continued to be published without the author’s name that are now considered to be written by that ‘author’. No new printed play was credited to the name afterThree1609.plays wee printed together and credited “by Will Shakespeare’ in 1600 “The History of King Stephen’, ‘Duke Humphrey, a Tragedy’ and ‘Iphis & Iantha, a Comedy’. After the printing of the Folio in 1623, other plays continued to be published with the credit to the same name including plays written and published before 1623, all without an author’s name. What would a playgoer or a play reader think of he Folio w=that credited for the first time plays neve before known to be the work of ‘William’ while omitting many plays that the reader or playgoer may have read or seen in Quarto that they understood to be by this same ‘William’ as many as twenty years before.? There has never been any written comment found on this oddity that must have puzzled the playgoer at the time, or did it ? No comment or opinion expressed, no disappointment or surprise. Did the public know that the author of ‘Henry V’ was not the author of ‘Cromwell’, both of which were produced or printed around 1600 ? ‘The Yorkshire Tragedy’ had its second Quarto printing in 1619 as credited to ‘W. Shakespeare’, but it was obvious that this play was not the work of the author of ‘King Lear’ published in the same year and credited to ‘M. Wullm Shakespeare’. No one had mentioned this author as anyone who was seen walking about the streets in the City of London as they had seen and known Ben Jonson and still could see him on the streets of London.

“Nicholl has had the excellent idea of trawling deeply in and around the numerous legal documents discovered in 1909 by the tenacious American scholars Charles and Hulda Wallace. These documents relate to Stephen Belott’s attempt in 1612 to extract a marriage settlement from his father in law, the Huguenot Christopher Mountjoy, Shakespeare’s former landlord.”

The usual unfounded assumptions appear in several reviews in the Times Literary Supplement of August 15, 2008. In one by Jonathan Bate: “It may well have been in part thanks to the Herbert brothers that Shakespeare’s acting company were [sic] given the title of the King’s Majesty’s Servants and the status of Grooms of the Chamber soon after James’s arrival in London.”

“The Essex circle was regrouping around the figure of Prince Henry, with Shakespeare’s old patron the Earl of Southampton, whom James had released from the Tower, prominent among his followers.”

No one had the Earl of Southampton as a patron although many had sought his patronage.

In the Times Literary Supplement of October 12, 2007, Lois Potter, the reviewer of a new book, ‘Shakespeare Revealed’ by Rene Weis, ‘reveals’ that this author, too, still looked for evidence that the Man from Stratford is the Author of Hamlet, but who stretches the imagination along with some known realities, yet none of the examples of guesswork overcomes the certainty that not one person ever claimed that he personally knew the person who wrote the Plays.

The recent authors still comb through documents that still are available from the official records of all of the people residing at Stratford from 1587 to 1616 and all authors past and present were led to the Stratford public information only after one member of the Shakespeare Society in the mid 19th century made the journey to the Stratford Records Office for the first time and he alone travelled there upon the full knowledge that in the Folio of 1632 was the line, ‘your Stratford Moniment’, written in the poem by Leonard Digges, that mentioned no further location. No theatrical or literary person ever visited the Stratford man before or after his death in 1616 either to meet him or any of his still living relatives beyond 1616. From the review: “This mixture of research and speculation shows Weis’s method at its best. . . Most readers will be surprised to learn that Emilia Lanier, Jane Davenant and Marie Mountjoy three women who knew Shakespeare well were all patients of Dr Simon Forman, and that the man [who] Shakespeare made his executor, Thomas Russell, was both a friend of Willoughby whose son published ‘Willoughby His Avisa (1594)’, with its apparently coded references to Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton, and was also by his second marriage, stepfather of the Leonard Digges whose verses on Shakespeare were published in the 1623 Folio.”

‘SHAKESPEARE’ IN THE 21st CENTURY Robert J. Meyer

Fully 500 years after the first two writings of the ‘Shake speare Plays’, books are still being written about the ‘Author’, all those from the mid 19th century to the present 21st considering that the ‘Man from Stratford’, ‘Wllm Shaxper’, is the sole author of the Plays in the Folios.

“Granted, there is firm evidence that Southampton and Pembroke gave Shakespeare their patronage, but patronage is not synonymous with intimacy.” This is stated without mentioning the ‘firm evidence’ that is lacking in biographies.

The book, ‘The Lodger, Shakespeare on Silver Street’ by Charles Nicholl, is reviewed in the December 14, 2007 issue of the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) by Katherine Duncan Jones.

All of these statements refer to what is known about Mr Shaxper of Stratford and cannot indicate that Shaxper was the author of even a letter.

After making two perceptive comments, Critic Everett still accepts the unsubstantiated belief that Stratford’s ‘Shaxper’ was the Author while there still is no evidence that anyone other than the poet who wrote the words ‘Stratford moniment’ printed in the First Folio ever hinted that he was a native of that town. Everett still relies solely on the ‘Stratford moniment’ words to continue the belief in Shaxper as in her statement, “He saved and invested wisely”, while referring to what is known of ‘Shaxper’. There is no document to say what ‘the Poet’ earned or saved.

In another TLS edition, of August 17, 2007, writer Barbara Everett ends her article on ‘Shakespeare’ by saying: “As the dead poet’s friends and editors, John Heminge and Henry Condell, said in the Folio, ‘Reade him, therefore’.”

Mr Shaxper was summoned from Stratford to appear in the London Court to give evidence as to who said what when Shaxper of Stratford was a lodger at the wig maker, Mountjoy’s house on Silver Street when he, Shaxper, and not the author of the Plays, resided in the upper flat.

These biographers were not ‘given’ this ignorance, as they already had it. ‘Given’ meaning ‘with’ is one of many poor linguistic inventions introduced from the beginning of the present 21st century“Among the very few perhaps apocryphal stories of Shakespeare in public that have come down to us, the poet is figured in his wit battles with Ben Jonson as the small English ship, with the other as the great Spanish galleon; or again, it is said that when invited to parties, Shakespeare would write that he had a headache.”

Most if not all of the ‘Shakespeare’ biographers of the 20th century steadfastly held that the greatest poet in the entire history of England was the man from Stratford, who was born in 1564, the date taken evermore as that of the Author and that all of the previous ‘traditional’ stories of ‘Shakespeare’ are true, and, unfortunately, that these and other inventions are still presented by the many biographers and commentators of the 21st century as another book reviewer, Barbara Everett, states in the Times Literary Supplement of August 17, 2007: “Of Shakespeare biography in particular there has been a flood over the last few decades, good, bad and indifferent. Given this ignorance, most biography either brings into play data which is tendentious to suppose relevant to him at all, or it makes more and more remarkable use of fiction (and this is true even of scholarly seeming quasi factual accounts).”

“Much of the new scholarship in Shakespeare biography is fiction. “Shakespeare’s London” is a clear case in point. The poet’s work gives no sense that his mind inhabited London as does the writing of John Donne, Samuel Johnson and Charles Lamb. Ben Jonson and T.S. Eliot are urban poets as Shakespeare never was.” “But it was the small town that he returned to. [Stratford Shaxper] His mind and his rooted loyalties were nourished in an earth of rural past and future, not by immediacy of London streets.”

“Shakespeare never brought himself to publish his own Sonnets. The odd title of “Shakespeare’s Sonnets” cannot have emanated directly from the poet himself.”

This relates to the living person, Mr Shaxper of Stratford, who was summoned from his town to appear in the London Court to give evidence as to who said what when Shaxper was a lodger at wig-maker Mountjoy’s house on Silver Street when he, Shaxper, and not the author of the Plays, resided in the upper flat.

No letter written either by the Poet or Stratford Shaxper has ever been found.

Again the commentator follows many others as she admits that she could not know that John always singed himself as ‘Heminges’ and that the actors never claimed they were ‘editors’.

Still in 2007, writers are stating that the actors, Heminges, not ‘Heminge’ and Condell were ‘editors’ of the Folio whereas they had no hand in the ‘editing’ or printing of the Plays. Writers still believe that these two surviving actors in 1623 were ‘friends’ of the ‘poet’, Shakespeare, who they also believe died in 1616 but it is Shaxper who died at Stratford in 1616 and no one knows when the ‘poet’ died. Neither Heminges nor Condell nor any other actor ever visited the town of Stratford to call upon their ‘friend’. No person of the theatre attended the funeral nor did anyone ever visit the Stratford house either before or after when no one visited a living relative or any one else in Stratford each of whom could have told them of Shaxper’s inability to write more than to scrawl his unreadable name on his will.

Still in 2007, writers are stating that the actors, Heminges, not ‘Heminge’ and Condell were ‘editors’ of the Folio whereas they had no hand in the ‘editing’ or the printing of the Plays.

No letter written either by the Author or by Stratford Shaxper has ever been found.

This is news to readers of any of the 20th century biographies of ‘Shakespeare’ as this is never mentioned. Reviewer Vickers also makes the false statement, still prevalent and never corrected, that “Jonson took issue with Shakespeare’s fellow actors (such as Heminge and Condell, who edited the First Folio).”

The TLS of August 19, 2005, reviews four new books about Shakespeare on pages 6 to 8, five new books on Page 10, one on Page 11, another on Page 12, and one on Elizabethan literature on Page 13. “Much of the new scholarship in Shakespeare biography; is fiction. “Shakespeare’s London” is a clear case in point. The poet’s work gives no sense that his mind inhabited London as does the writing of John Donne, Samuel Johnson and Charles Lamb. Ben Jonson and T.S. Eliot are urban poets as Shakespeare never was.” “But it was the small town that he returned to. [This is Stratford Shaxper] His mind and his rooted loyalties were nourished in an earth of rural past and future, not by an immediacy of London streets.”

Writers still believe that these two surviving actors in 1623 were ‘friends’ of the ‘poet’, Shakespeare, who they also believe died in 1616 but it is Mr Shaxper who died at Stratford in 1616 and no one knows when the ‘poet’ died. Neither Heminges nor Condell nor any other actor ever visited the town of Stratford to call upon their ‘friend’. No person of the theatre attended the funeral, nor did any of the actors or Ben Jonson visit Stratford before or after 1616.

The review by Brian Vickers of the first four new books states: “Although Christopher Marlowe was to all appearances killed in a tavern brawl in Deptford on May 30, 1593, his death being certified at an inquest held on June 1 and presided over by the Queen’s coroner, at which sixteen local jurors acquitted the assailant, Ingram Frazer, on the grounds of self defence, this was all an elaborate scam arranged by Thomas Walsingham, Queen’s spymaster and Marlowe’s (friend). The body buried in an unmarked grave in St Nicholas’s Churchyard on June 1 was that of John Penry, the Separatist leader, who had just been executed. . .The true story, not revealed until 1955, persuaded those who erected a plaque to Marlowe in Westminster Abbey to give his death date as ‘1593?’.”

“Among the very few perhaps apocryphal stories of Shakespeare in public that have come down to us, the poet is figured in his wit battles with Ben Jonson as the small English ship, with the other as the great Spanish galleon; or again, it is said that when invited to parties, Shakespeare would write that he had a headache.” (Everett, TLS, Aug. 17, 2007)

Also in this review, Vickers states, “As for the Tempest, Bullough endorsed the well founded view that Shakespeare was affected by the events of 1609 10, when a hurricane hit the Virginia Company’s fleet which was carrying 400 new colonists, the governor’s ship foundering near Bermuda. These events were widely reported in London, both in printed pamphlets and in a famous letter by William Strachey (not published until 1625), used by Shakespeare, who also knew several members of the Virginia Company personally.”

It has long before been revealed that the phrase does not refer to the ‘Bermuda’ foundering but that it has been established that it refers to a section of London then named the ‘Bermoothes’.

Thisstow’d.”doesnot sound like a ship foundering in a ‘hurricane and a foundering ship near Bermuda’ as all are safe and well in Ariel’s description. There seems to be no need for the Author to enquire from Strachey the contents of his letter regarding a ship foundering near Bermuda and then refer to it as ‘Bermoothes’.

Critic Everett still accepts the unsubstantiated belief that Stratford’s ‘Shaxper’ was the Author while there still is no evidence that anyone other than the poet who wrote the words ‘Stratford moniment’ printed in the Second Folio ever mentioned this. “Only two authenticated images of the poet have survived. One is the engraving by Martin Droeshout which prefaces the First Folio. The other is the bust of Gerard Johnson in the parish church at Stratford upon Avon. An extraordinary large number of viewers, at different periods, have condemned both engraving and bust as horribly disappointing; the only exception to them is the historian A.L. Rowse, who lauds the engraving in the highest terms as a noble portrait of genius. John Dover Wilson said that the bust is the picture of a local pork butcher.”

Prospero: But was not this nigh shore ?

Ariel: Safely in harbour Is the king’s ship ; in the deep nook, where once thou call’dst me up at midnight to fetch dew from the still vexd’d Bermoothes, there she’s hid: the mariners all under hatches

That ‘Shakespeare’ knew anyone in London ‘personally’ is also ‘new’ or unreported by the many 20h Century biographers and no explanation is made here by Vickers nor does he explain how Shakespeare ‘used’ the letter by Strachey when it was not published until 1625 ! How would Shakespeare know of the existence of the letter or of its contents in order to borrow the letter to read it ? Then to place this short phrase into the play, The Tempest, and so soon in Act I, Scene II ?

Regarding the ‘portraits’ of Shakespeare forwarded over the years:

Ariel: Close by, my master. Prosp: But are they, Ariel, safe ? Ariel: Not a hair perish’d; On their sustaining garments not a blemish, In troops I have dispersed them ‘bout the isle. Prosp: And all the rest ‘o the fleet ?

“Much of the new scholarship in Shakespeare biography; is fiction. ‘Shakespeare’s London’ is a clear case in point. The poet’s work gives no sense that his mind inhabited London as does the writing of John Donne, Samuel Johnson and Charles Lamb. Ben Jonson and T.S. Eliot are urban poets as Shakespeare never was.” “But it was the small town that he returned to. [This is Stratford Shaxper] His mind and his rooted loyalties were nourished in an earth of rural past and future, not by an immediacy of London streets.”

“Ariel: All, but mariners Plung’d in the foaming brine, and quit the vessel, then all afire with me: the king’s son, Ferdinand, with hair up staring (then, like reeds, not hair), was the first man that leap’t cried, Hell is empty and all the devils are here !

“Some half dozen candidates for glory have been put forward, led by the “Chandos’ and the “Grafton” portraits.” The Chandos (1600 10), the Soest (c1667), Sanders (young) (1603), Janssen (c1610), Flower (1620-40), and the Grafton all have pointed beards but all are “discernibly upper-class”.

Christopher Marlowe, upon completion of his years at Cambridge that were seven when receiving his M.A., was academically equipped to enter the Clergy at his age of 23. William Shaxper of Stratford did not go to a college or to a university and it is unsure at which age he left Free School.Marlowe and the other dramatists were never taught to write plays. The Arts were not the subjects of free school or university. Few plays existed in 1585 other than ‘Mysterie Playes’ and most plays that were available to read were those of the ancients in Greek or Latin and some in English translation. In Elizabethan time, plays and poetry in English were usually about Greek and Roman heroes. ‘Tarquin’ is mentioned by the amateur authors of ‘Willobie His Avisa’ and in ‘Julius Caesar’ with the phrase, ‘Tarquin’s ravishing strides’.

SHAKE SPEARE OFFSTAGE Robert J. Meyer

Without genuine documents from Stratford archives until the mid nineteenth century, from the blank sheet that fully described ‘William Shake speare’, the early biographers who date only from 1703 could fill the pristine page only by their inventive wits to describe their famous poet who, by rumour only, was a man who had lived in Stratford, one ‘William Shaxper’. ‘William Shake speare’ or ‘W.S.’ was the name or initials placed in various forms on two Poems, some few Quartos and upon the First Folio of 36 Plays in 1623 after the ‘real’ Poet’s life.

William, according to any evidence present, did not associate with the playwrights of his time of up to 1616. He did not associate with the members of the ‘School of Night’, a group of free thinkers and friends of Sir Walter Ralegh for many years. The early biographer, John Aubrey, wrote of ‘Shaksper’ in a brief ‘note’ that “He was not a company keeper, lived in Shoreditch, wouldn’t be debauched, & if invited to writ; he was in paine”, without knowing the man or interviewing anyone who knew William. No evidence exists that William translated from Latin or owned books. Shaxper bequeathed no library of books to anyone including his son in law, Dr. Hall, who owned an extensive library that he bequeathed to his son in law Another lad, Richard Field, who was schooled by the same ushers and masters at the Free School at Stratford as was William Shaxper and who was two years older than William, left Stratford at 16 for the big City of London where he learned his trade as an apprentice to a printer and when he became a professional, he set up his own printing shop and printed books in English, Latin, Greek and Hebrew.The ‘reputation’ of the name ‘Shakespeare’, rarely if ever as ‘William’, began as a single penned entry in the Registry Office of London in the fall of 1593 and in the few years that ensued, he was known entirely as a poet of ‘honey ed verse’ with the ‘sugared sonnets’ and only as a poet in the few references in print until 1598. As early as 1593, playwrights referred to each other’s plays and pamphlets in their own plays or pamphlets. There began ‘The War of the Theatre’ wherein one poet-playwright would write a satire or critique of another writer’s previous play then to be answered in kind by another’s play following. The patrons became familiar with the backstage rivalries and it was a great incentive for the public to come later for a continued serial of opposing views. Even the popular actors, Burbadge and Kempe were characterized in a play where other actors impersonated them. William’s name never came up during these stage conversations in the ‘War of the Theatre’.

The subjects taught in the English universities of the 17th century were selected to prepare those few students who by completing nine years at their local grammar or ‘free school’ chose to have a career in Law, the Ministry or in Medicine, or in the following years, a career in the Navy Command or in the Foreign Service and the required subjects were designed primarily for each of those professional careers, Greek for the Ministry, Latin for Medicine, advanced mathematics for the Navy. Students entered Free School at the age of seven and they left at the age of sixteen or earlier if they were required at home for farming or for the family business.

John Aubrey was given assignments of research by biographer, Anthony a Wood, who accused Aubrey of being ‘Magotie headed and exceedingly credulous’ also saying that Aubrey padded his letters with misinformation and nonsense. Even the learned Dr. Samuel Johnson repeated Aubrey’s inspired inventions without credence. That story concerns William being a young man who ‘held horses’ for those theatregoers in London who came by horse. The story goes that young William became so efficient at horse parking that he hired young lads to assist him, but regular patrons wanting his particular services would demand to be served only by William so he coached his assistants to say, “I’m Shakespeare’s boy, Sir !”, when they were asked for ‘Shakespeare’. It is a short step to where it is claimed that he was ‘invited into the Theatre’. This tale falls apart when it is asked why this young ‘stable boy’ would be looked upon as a ‘boy’ when he was 27 and why other boys would be readily accepted when all would demand only this one ‘boy’ who proved to be so excellent a ‘horse holder’. How many horses could this ‘horse holder’ hold all ready at the door ?

Later biographers interpret this story as William advertising his name for future use in the theatre as if such a ‘young lad’ would have any dream of being ‘in the Theatre’ not having shown any interest in being an actor. This is more typical of 19th century ‘rags to riches’ stories written about young lads working their way up in the world. It is more logical that he would be ‘advertising’ his name for an immediate extra tip to his ‘boys’ who would provide the same brand of service assured under the trademark, ‘Shakespeare’, the stipends to be divided by the franchiser, ‘William Shakespeare the name you can trust’. ‘Logic’ cannot be found in these legends.Almost all of the writers and craftsmen of the time were well established at their trade by the age of twenty. Edward Alleyne, the actor, was a member of ‘Worcester’s Men’ when he was eighteen. Richard Field went to London to apprentice as a printer at sixteen. Christopher Marlowe wrote his ‘Tamburlaine’ at Cambridge and had translated full works of Ovid, Lucan and others before coming to London at 23. Thomas Nashe was writing at 23 and Robert Greene wrote his ‘Mamillia’ in imitation to John Lyly’s ’Euphues’ at 23. John Ford wrote ’Fame’s Memorial’ at 20 and the prolific Francis Beaumont had written two plays in 1607 at 23

Every person who excelled at his trade, and not only those who were famous, began to practice their craft at an early age. They were intensely interested in their craft expecting it to be a life-long source of income. Evidence is lacking of any special interest by anyone of the identity of this Author whose name appeared only on two long poems and on two printed Quartos where he is mentioned as ‘Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespeare’ William of Stratford was known only as a money lender and a holder of farm acreage.

For the Author of the Plays there is no need to invent, as many have imagined, a long apprenticeship in a lawyer’s office, a traveller through Italy and a service at sea, all repeated by one or more biographers. Very early stories came from unnamed sources but printed as authentic by early biographers of what William did after free school One writer said that he served in his ‘father’s butcher shop’, another, that he was a ‘schoolmaster in the country’. These fables began or were taken as genuine by John Aubrey after 1700: “His father was a Butcher, & I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father’s trade, but when he kill’d a Calfe, he would doe it in a high style, and make a speech”. When the Town records were revealed in the 19th century, Williams’ father, John Shaxper, was proved to be a maker of gloves who held the highest office in Stratford but could not write. A schoolmaster teaching during William’s day was a graduate from Oxford and William did not attend a College or a University as there is no record of him at Oxford or Cambridge.

A commentary written by Katharine Duncan Jones and printed in the April 14, 2006 edition of the Times Literary Supplement states: “Three illusions by the writing master and poet John Davies of Hereford seem to refer to a disappointment suffered by Shakespeare soon after the accession of James I. They suggest that a career as a leading player on public stages prevented both him and his colleague and friend Richard Burbage from receiving promotion which, in Davies view, they fully merited. The first occurs in ‘Microcosmos (1603), an encyclopaedic poem describing and celebrating the little world of England for the benefit of the new King. ‘Players, I love thee, and you Qualitie, As ye are Men that pass time not abus’d: And some I love for painting, poesie And say fell Fortune cannot be excus’d’. His [Davies] own favourite players, identified in a marginal note as ‘W.S.’ and ‘R.B.’, that is William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage, are not celebrated for acting alone. Each has a further skill, in Burbage’s case painting, and in Shakespeare’s ‘poesie’ or literaryTherecomposition.”isnothing in the eight lines quoted that can be construed as referring to either Burbadge or ‘Shakespeare’. Duncan Jones explains that, “Davies uses the correct technical term, ‘quality’ to describe the profession of acting”. She does not state whether Davies’ ‘marginal note’ is printed in the ‘poem’ or if it is an added note written by hand. The marginal note does not state the names of Davies’ ‘favourites’ but uses initials only.

Another of the fictitious claims is that William was an actor. No claim that he was an actor appeared during William’s lifetime. In the edition of Jonson’s plays printed after 1616, the name ‘William Shakespeare’ is listed as the name of one having acted in one or two of Jonson’s plays. No explanation is given as to why this very late listing was made after William had died when no other exists. All of these claims, including any hint that ‘Shakespeare’ was William of Stratford, were made not immediately after 1616 when it was not possible for Mr Shaxper to express any comment upon them, and not soon after the Folio of 1623 as no one was interested in going to Stratford but all invented claims began after 1660 when Sir William Davenant opened a theatre in London after the Revolution period that banned play producing in theatres.

All of this being known throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the biographers of those many decades still invented claims to fill the void. A full set of duties has accumulated for the William that was ‘associated’ with the Burbadge theatre group that began with father James Burbadge and was inherited by his sons, Richard and Cuthbert, but these names rarely are mentioned by the biographers who assign various stations to William: actor, director, share holder and ultimately the owner of ‘Shakespeare’s Company’ It was not necessary to be an actor to be a shareholder. Laurence Fletcher who did not act was a sharer and he may have been appointed by the Queen to be a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. There were actor sharers and there were actors who were not sharers, some hired part time, some for non speaking parts and all were paid according to their participation over the entire season. Actor sharers were paid for acting and shared in the proceeds of the theatre. A share was real property to be kept, sold or bequeathed to another. The claim that William was a share holder began by the ‘discovery’ of a ‘document’ that listed him as a member of the group playing at the Blackfriars Theatre, a paper that was later found to be a forgery but the falseness of it never abated the rush of reprints in biographies that led to the infamous claim of ‘Shakespeare’s Company’.

The others, John Fletcher, John Marston, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson were all produced playwrights when they were twenty seven. The name ‘William Shake spear’ was not known in print until after 1593 when William of Stratford was twenty-nine ! The notation on this poem, ‘Venus and Adonis’ claimed that this was his first literary invention.

This still does not state that Davies knew personally or knew of a man called ‘Shakespeare’ whom he had witnessed acting upon the stage. From the contents of the poem as quoted, it cannot be concluded as the author does what this poem implies that the two names are ‘celebrated’ therein for the ‘further skill’ of ‘painting’ and ‘poesie’, or that Burbadge is praised for ‘painting’ and ‘Shakespeare’ for ‘poesie’ or for the added ‘literary composition’.

“The marginal note on this line. . . recalls the praise Henry Chettle bestows on Shakespeare in ‘Kind Harts Dream’ (1592), having recently learned of his ‘uprightness of dealing which argues his honesty’.” Any reference by Chettle does not refer in any manner to a ‘Shakespeare’ and, further, the name was never in print until after the fall of 1593.

“A marginal note refers again to W.S. and R.B., Davies’s third allusion is to Shakespeare alone. His collection of epigrams ‘The Scourge of Folly” (1611) includes a laudatory poem addressed “To our English Terence Mr. Will. Shakespeare”: ‘Some say (good Will) which I, in sport, do sing Had’st thou not plaid some kingly parts in sport Thou had’st bin a companion to a King’.” By 1611 the name was known to be on several Quartos and this tribute does not confirm or hint that Davies knew the identity of the name or that he personally knew anyone by that name.“This epigram falls within a group of epigrams praising men Davies admires, including his friends Samuel Daniel and Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, and Mr. John Speed. Though Shakespeare is not explicitly addressed as a ‘friend’, the word ‘our’, combined with the familiar ‘good Will, suggest that he may have been Davies’s personal acquaintance as well as a national treasure.”

This excuse continues the desperate search for the slightest indication that anyone placed upon a page a confirmation that the person had met the elusive ‘William’. The phrase, ‘(good Will)’ is placed in parenthesis by the epigram’s author, Davies’. The word ‘our’ had no bearing on personal knowledge but was used widely for any name in the ‘public eye’ which is what this name was, a ‘public name’ only. Stating that he ‘may’ have been a personal acquaintance is only yet another hopeful guess. In 1611, the name had not reached the status of ‘a national treasure’. The name was unknown by the time that Davenant revived some of the Plays in 1660 after the ban on public theatre performances was lifted and he revealed them to a public that was open to believe anything they were told by Davenant or others about this ‘national treasure’.

“Davies’s epigram has not been much discussed by Shakespeare’s biographers. Yet, again, he suggests that Shakespeare has missed advancement because of his profession of a player. As leading member, along with Burbage, of the King’s Men, he was already in a minor way a ‘companion to a King’. It was as ‘his Majesties Groomes of the Chamber and Players’ that Shakespeare, Burbage and their fellow King’s Men were paid for eighteen days of attendance on the Spanish peace delegates in August 1604.”

All of these statements are a continuation of the belief that William was a ‘player’ and even taking the one insertion of his name in the compilation of Jonson’s plays as genuine still would not claim him to be a ‘leading member’ in yet another company.

Further in the article Duncan Jones says in parenthesis: “(As Davies surely knew, both Shakespeare’s grant of arms had been awarded by Garter King of Arms, William Dethick in 1596….)”William Shaxper did not apply for a ‘coat of arms’ for himself. The application as outlined in several biographies was for his father John and all qualifications stated were of John, but some biographers still claim that the ‘coat of arms’ was for William. No mention of being a writer or playwright or actor was included in the appeal. The commentary continues: -

John Ward, the Stratford vicar who planned to visit William’s daughter, Judith, wrote of William without speaking to Judith: “He frequented the plays all his younger time, but in his elder days lived at Stratford”, and this without knowing anything of William as he describes him only a playgoer “all his younger time”, living “at Stratford” “in his elder days”. . . at 47 ? This was time to put up the quill, no more torrent and tempest of enthusiasm, no longer caught up in the very whirlwind of passion ? William Shaxper’s interest in thoughts was overwhelmed by his thoughts in interests on his loaning money. He had not ‘retired’, not while there was money to be put in his purse. Will’s trade had always been his will to trade in money.

To explain why this great author of the Plays ‘retired’ at the age of 47 and died at the age of 52 in 1616 taking these ages and dates only from those later known to be of William Shaxper of Stratford, biographers often claim that ‘people were older then’, or ‘they grew old quickly’ in Elizabethan times. Do they infer that people died at a younger age than they did in 1850 when many of the later biographies began ? Obviously the average age expectancy lengthened dramatically after 1900 when Doctor’s hands were scrubbed for the first time before entering surgery. This alone lengthened ‘life expectancy’ as the number of deaths of women during child birth and the survival of the newborn. Life expectancy is taken in averaging the lifetimes of those who have died recently. The ages of those who die in battle or of disease are averaged with those that live a ‘full life’ and wars and plagues and other diseases kept the ‘life expectancy’ low during the years of Elizabeth’s reign This did not reflect the ages of those who did not die of disease or battle. The age of 52 was still young for that time. William’s wife lived to be 68 and this woman worked making bread and beer, cooked and cleaned for her three children alone without servants for her entire life. A far easier life physically had William whatever he did for an income of monies. His daughter, Judith, lived 77 years as did her sister, Joan. His brother, Gilbert, the haberdasher in London, died at 46 and his brother Richard died at 39, and brother Edmund died at 27 but they represented one family of Stratford. However, when he died, Thomas Dekker was 60, Ben Jonson was 64, Francis Bacon was 65, Thomas Heywood was 67 and George Chapman was 75. William neither lived as long as one half of the dramatists nor died by poverty, sickness or by the sword as did the other half.

Will never seemed to be a part of the creative scene, he was never associated with Ralegh’s ’School of Night’ wherein conversations bubbled and boiled among some of the greatest minds of the age discussing science, mysticism, astronomy, explorations, drama and writings, with politics and religion questioned. The printer, Richard Field, was ‘tied’ to his printing press but had a great interest in his customers and knew what was current in books and broadsides and with the many authors of London. William’s brother, “Gilbert Shackspeare de parochia sancte Brigitte, London, haberdasher”, knew his customers and to serve them well, he kept abreast of the fashions current in the City. William, too, took an interest in his customers or, more precisely, took due interest from them. Those known among them were Richard Quiney who could borrow a hefty sum from him with excellent security, his friends Thomas Bushell, eldest son of the wealthy squire of Long Marston, and Richard Mytton, a gentleman in the service of the Lord of the Manor of Stratford, Sir Edward Greville, or Adrian’s father, Adrian Quiney, who can inform William in advance in order to get him in on the ground floor of a mighty financial deal. Adrian had written: “Yff yow bargen with Mr. Sha. or receve money therfor brynge your money home yfyow maye. I see howe knite stockynges be sold, ther ys gret byinge of them at Evyshome. Edward Wheat and Harrye, your brother (in law)’s man, were both at Evyshome thys daye senet, and, as I harde, bestow 20 LL ther in knyt hosseyngs, wherefore I thynke yow maye doo good yff yow can have money” and as Richard Quiney wrote to Sturley in his letter: “Of the 25 of October, which imported that our countryman Mr. Wm. Shak. would procure us monej.”

All writers, lawyers, students or readers of books had almost equal access to printed quartos, translations, to Plutarch’s ‘Lives’ in English or to Holinshed’s historical ‘Chronicles’. All would equally open to copy misprints, fault y information or to misstate scientific, political, geographical or historical subjects. It was not necessary for a writer to have served in a law office to make references to points of law, no need he travel to Venice to describe it in a play. An author could make an error of geography if he had visited a site as well as reading about it. To have written the Plays with all their faults pointed out by critics, required a fervent interest and passion in writing. To write at all, a writer must have a persistent interest in the subject at hand for prose or poetry. In writing the dialogue of the characters in plays, to wrench out of them their inward, unspoken feelings, the author must have a tenfold passionate interest for he is bound in on all sides by the unfolding conversations, by the give and take of those people who will come alive upon the stage, some of whom may take over the writer and lead him where he did not intend to go. Once committed to the purpose of the scene, he cannot veer from it. He must steer straight never backtracking or deviating to qualify his remarks or take time out to explain a point as he can when writing prose. It takes an equal talent to doctor a finished play when he finds that the play just does not work as it stands. A writer can change his direction in prose but he can never lose the mood in a play. He may change the mood, but he must never lose it.

The greatest objection to either ‘William Shakespeare’ or ‘William Shaxper’ as being the author of the Plays is provided by the next witness, William himself, William the man, off stage. Since there is no documented evidence of the nature and character of ‘W.S.’, all the later biographers have searched dictionaries to find words to ascribe to the phantom. With their talented imaginations, historians and biographers have ‘fleshed out’ the faint outline with a flattering description here and a pleasant phrase there. No descriptions of the play writer or the Man from Stratford exist but the impressions of the biographers from the repetitions of their borrowings of 1700 trivia from handed down legends of others to the 20th century ‘logical’ set of actions that ‘no doubt’ he ‘must’ have done since he was ‘alive’ during all incidents that occurred in London from 1593 to his demise in 1616 until they have amassed the portrait of a person who was in every manner like no other man who did live in those years. According to his biographers through to the 21st century, from the moment that anyone met him, the impression that he instantly gave was that he was not only ingenious, but purely ingenuous, not only as a brilliant man but a strait forward man, candid and frank, natural and open. No matter how long anyone knew him that impression never varied. The words that were used to describe his nature completely filled the thesaurus under a friendly, gentle man, kindly, engaging, unassuming, obliging, good mannered, sweet natured, all this but still a remarkable man. Upon talking to him one would come away to tell another that he had just met a very extraordinary man but he would say that he had been speaking to a most fine fellow. If the conversation had been lengthy, he would add that he had met a very witty man, but with no malice in the wit. Whatever the occasion, ‘William’ was smooth, pleasant and good company to be with. His ability to be not only liked but well liked was effortless.

Quiney and Sturley were mercers and William was disposed to be mercenary, in the 17th century sense “influenced by a desire for gain or reward” as a trader and investor in property, land tithes and grains, and as a lender of money, William engaged in what was a full-time occupation. Being in London, lodging in houses that he did not own, he had the money to invest little by lot and to manage those investments by walking about the City or standing on the downtown corner were stood the ‘stocks’ by the cattle market. At a time in which, contrary to general opinion, there is surprisingly ample and varied documented information about, not only political events, but also theatre, plays, and listings, official and private letters, but there is no information of a ‘William’ writing plays.

Today, ‘William’s’ Venus Adonis’ or his ‘Lucrece’ make impatient reading. In his day, they were not to be compared to the poetry of Spenser, Sidney or Marlowe. His ‘Dedication’ was but the imitation of the style of the formal dedications made by others which were designed to praise the hoped for patron and to minimize the worthiness of the dedicator poet. William’s ‘Dedication’ of ‘Venus’ reveals the uninspiring effort of William when it is compared to the honest style of the contemporary John Webster, who dedicated his ‘The Duchess of Malfi’ to Baron“IBerkeley:donotaltogether

William’s ‘Sonnets’ have been described as extremely irritating, full of puns, affectations and conceits, all the literary artificialities in which, down through the years, readers have found hidden meanings, codes, mysteries, autobiographical references and lost loves assuming that the writer was completely sincere and not realizing that every real artist does not conjure with word phrases when he is passionately expressing himself. The book of ‘Sonnets’ was not intended to be taken as enigmatic self confessions. Sonnets were always seen in private circles as being a social pastime, unless the poet was a master poet, as was Philip Sidney. Students at the Inns of Court thought them to be great sport, excellent vehicles to go the other fellow one better, outdoing each other with alliterations, puns and antitheses and with love, rivalry and despair being the popular themes. Only the University students were the followers of ‘Lucrece’ and ‘Venus’ as these poems were far overdone. Wily students loved the current craze for ‘honey dropping’ verse, ‘sweet nectar’d’ phrases and the literary lovemaking was experienced vicariously by their sonneteering. Young noblemen were fair game for flattery in their sonnets, and Richard Barnfield’s ‘Certain Sonnets’ is awash with the same utterances of lips that drop honey, sweet boys, beauty to behold in the fairest youth along with envy, jealousy and guilt.

look up at your title; the ancientist nobility being but a relic of time past, as the truest honour indeed being for a man to confer honour on himself. I am confident this work is not unworthy of your honour’s perusal; for by such poems as this poet’s have kissed the hands of great princes, and drawn their gentle eyes to look down upon their sheets of paper when the poets themselves were bound up in their winding sheets. The like courtesy from your lordship shall make you live in your grave, and laurel spring out of it . .”

‘William the poet’ was no egotist. It is said that ‘he was less of an egotist than any famous man in history’. William Wordsworth was the exact opposite to ‘William’. Wordsworth was the complete poet-egotist. John Keats said that the real poet ‘has no identity’, that he is always ‘filling some other Body’. Poets throughout history have known their own ability and probably would not write at all if they did not think themselves worthy to write better than the next poet, playwright or novelist.

Berkeley would gain immortality by having history associate his name with a John Webster play ! There is a man who knew his worth ! Take it or leave it, but that is not the safe way to put money in your purse. One cannot be censured in opting for money if ability as a poet is unsure, and the poet was a good fellow who did not wish to offend lest he be rejected.

The ‘Shakespeare Sonnets’ has been regular curriculum fare in 20th century schools while Barnfield’s sonnets are long forgotten. It would be interesting to ponder on how beloved Barnfield’s ‘Ceratine Sonnets’ would be if the book had been published under the name of ‘Shake speare’. Those who have described a man who is well liked or who wished to be well liked by those he met are presenting a true description of the man who is known to be documented as the man who lodged at several houses in London and who bought land, invested in corn tithes, lent monies and who purchased a house on High Street at Stratford to which he retired, an affable, courteous and friendly man who was easily approached to speak to and had all the inherent qualities of a natural, inborn and clever businessman.

Constant congeniality, however, is hardly the attribute for an effective theatre director or a passionate playwright whose plays will stir the hearts of patrons and raise them up to cheer. However likeable Noel Coward and George Bernard Shaw may have been, both were outspoken and cuttingly sharp in their critiques of grievous violations of justice in society or in individuals both in their dramas and in private drawing rooms. Most of the poets and playwrights of those fifty years from 1580 and 1630 were astute observers of their society and their cutting criticisms poured out in their plays and pamphlets. Robert Greene wrote ‘On the London Underworld’. Thomas Nashe wrote satiric attacks in pamphlets under the pen name of ‘Pasquil’ and exposed current abuses in his play, “The Isle of Dogs’. Thomas Dekker wrote a book with the ironic title, ‘The Wonderful Year’, his penetrating description of London during the plague. John Webster’s ‘The Duchess of Malfi’ portrayed a world of extravagant passions, dark intrigue and fratricidal violence. John Marston’s ‘The Scourge of Villanie’ was a collection of twelve bitter satires on the vices of his times and these books were burned by high order of the Archbishop of Canterbury.‘William the Writer’ remained as calm as the swans that plied the Thames but, unlike these writers or the swans, he never ruffled any feathers. His character had nothing in common with the poets and playwrights that were before, during his lifetime, or after, as he always avoided controversy, even in the most mundane situations wherein someone may try to involve him.

At that time, all business dealings were between individuals on a person to person basis. Business proposals expressed in words by letter were still person to person with each party known to the other. All names mentioned as sureties were also well-known to the lender and trusted by Williamhim of Stratford was a knowledgeable investor. The words ‘shrewd’ or ‘crafty’ are never implied but he was firm and business like with those who did not pay on time. He had taken more than one person to court for non payment of a mere pound and a few shillings. No incident is recorded where he lost money in dealing or where he was unsuccessful in any investment. To be a fair but firm investor, dealing person to person, needs an even, constant but most congenial character and that was William of Stratford.

Stratford Will was summoned away from ‘retirement’ at Stratford and to Court in London to testify in the dispute between his old landlord on Silver Street, Christopher Mountjoy and the landlord’s son in law, Stephen Bellott over Bellott’s complaint that his father in law had not paid him the promised L50 upon marrying Mountjoy’s daughter, Mary. On the witness stand, William was his affable self. Although this suit was ten years after the marriage, William could remember everything. He affirmed that as an apprentice to Mountjoy, Bellott “did well and honestly behaved himself”, and was “a very good and industrious servant” to whom he had “great goodwill and affection and “between Mountjoy and Bellott” “they had amongst themselves many conferences”. No need for animosity thus far with compliments to both sides divided equally, but when it came to the particulars of the dispute, William “remembereth not what certain portion in marriage Bellott was promised”, nor which “implements and necessaries of household stuff” were actually given. He could not remember whether the promised sum was L60 nor could he recall a further 200L to be left in a will. The next witness in the box, Daniel Nicholson, could vividly recall hearing from William at that time that the sum was indeed around L50 or so along with some household goods and he could remember, too, that William related how Mountjoy, who inveigled William to encourage Bellott to marry his daughter, had said that if she did marry Bellott, “she would never cost him a groat”. The suit carried on for more than a month but William was excused from giving any more of his ‘recollections’. William always kept himself squeaky clean as he avoided any action that would cost him money or reputation.

Francis Langley was the builder of the Swan and owner of the Paris Garden acreage where it stood on the Southbank. William Wayte was the stepson of the Justice of the Peace, Magistrate Gardiner in Surrey, who had been described by Langley as “a false knave, a false forsworn knave and a perjured knave”, which was a true assessment of the Magistrate, but not taking this lightly, Gardiner sent his stepson down to close the theatre. Wayte was met with stern opposition waiting for him at the theatre door through which, he was told, he would enter only if he valued not his life. Thus the supposed conversation that ensued: - “Do you bite your thumb at us, sir ?” “I do bite my thumb.” “Do you quarrel, sir ?” “Quarrel, sir ? Who, sir ? Me, sir ? No, not I, sir.”

Another biographer, Hesketh Pearson, whets the interest by making this statement, “The comic element in the street brawls between Capulets and Montagues may have been suggested to Shakespeare by personal experience, for in the year 1596, he took part in something that looks suspiciously like a free fight”. Reading on hurriedly, it is found that he is referring only to this Swan Theatre incident where it must be asked again, “Did Anne and Dorothy also take part in this suspicious ‘free fight’ ? It is insulting to any author to have it implied as Pearson does that some personal experience in a ‘free fight’ between two opposing groups would be necessary to write a play about a warring family in the Middle Ages. Mr. Shaxper was not present at the ‘fight’ nor were Anne and Dorothy as they were all only ‘names’ in the ‘writ’ and probably never knew anything of the incident nor did Mr. Shaxper

William was named in a Writ of Attachment issued to the Sheriff of Surrey stating in Latin that “William Wayte begs securities of the peace against William Shakespeare, Francis Langley, Dorothy Soer, wife of John Soer, and Anne Lee, for fear of death, et cetera…” but William’s only association with this writ was that he was named as a shareholder in the Swan Theatre across the river at Southbank and was as innocent of any charge as was Anne and Dorothy.

William kept out of the squabbles of those with whom he was financially involved though his own interests may have been at risk. He did not enter the controversy over the enclosures of open land in Warwickshire by Arthur Mainwaring as William was mainly wary himself of siding with the landlords of which he was one or with the villagers with whom he also belonged. When asked by the Town Clerk, Thomas Greene, to discuss the enclosure problem, William agreed with his friend, Mr. Hall, that “they think there will be nothing done at all”. He was right as the scheme eventually fell through.

Biographer Hesketh Pearson feels that “The interesting thing about his evidence [in court] is that at the age of 48, as we should have guessed from his break down, his memory was failing him”. In his testifying in the court, William’s memory was excellent on trivial complimentary information. He also had an excellent forgetory to avoid the divisive information that was important to the case. This ‘breakdown’ is not found in his son in law doctor’s date book.

William was never sued although he kept neglecting to pay those notices for taxes owing that came each year from Bishopsgate, this is, of course, if William of Stratford was the Shaxper who had ‘moved’ out of the district near the Stocks Market.

Another recent biographer, F.E. Halliday, finds that the main importance of this episode is its “revelation of Shakespeare as a man with whom it was by no means safe to trifle”. Was it then as unsafe to trifle with Anne and Dorothy ? The four were all named in the writ only because the names of the legal owners of the Swan Theatre would be copied down from the list in the registration at the law court or wherever the writ was filed after being drawn up by the lawyer. Magistrate Gardiner was observing legal procedure and he probably did not know who Soer or Lee were any more than anyone knows today. He most likely never heard of or cared about any ‘Willm Shaxper’ as it did not matter to him who they were as he was after the ‘theatre owner’ who had made the scurrilous ‘false knave’ statements and he wanted to close down his theatre.

Is this biographer of William, and possibly a ‘Shakespeare Plays’ scholar, unaware that the Capulet Montague play was taken from a much older story from the continent ?

All the Elizabethans writers lived a much different London life and their London is etched by the acid titles of their books: ‘Strange News’ by Nashe, ‘If it be not good, the Devil is in it’ by Dekker, ‘The Scourge of Villanie” by Marston, and ‘Eastward Ho !’ by Ben Jonson, John Marston and George Chapman. ‘The title, ‘Eastward Ho !’, seems innocent enough but all three authors were jailed at the Old Marshalsea for writing it in 1605. Thomas Nashe was incarcerated in like manner at the Fleete prison on Fairington Street for going too far in revealing what he knew about the times in his “The Isle of Dogs’ in 1597. Ben Jonson killed the actor, Gabriel Spence, in a duel to the death, and Spencer also had killed a man. Dramatist John Day had driven his sword into dramatist Henry Porter.

George Wither was imprisoned twice in the Old Marshalsea near the entrance to Mermaid Court, in 1614 for sedition in his ‘Abuses, Stript and Whipt’ of 1613, and imprisoned again in 1621 after publication of his ‘Wither’s Motto’ that was suspected of satire. Satire ? Disgraceful ! At the entrance to Angel Place stood King’s Bench prison where Thomas Dekker was confined for debt. John Donne graced the prison of Fleet Street in 1601 for secretly marrying a minor. The Tower of London held more than one knight or noble. The Earl of Essex, the Queen’s most ardent suitor and servant, was beheaded within the Tower grounds and the Earl of Southampton, a comrade in arms of Essex, was sent to fill another room in this hole of hell until the Queen died but still with no pardon from her.

William of Stratford was never arrested. Should that seem remarkable ? To read of every incident in any ‘Life of William Shakespeare’ without reading the life and times of any other writer of the late Elizabethan era is to spend a weekend in the country or a day at Bartholomew Fair. Those times are pictured to have been as charming as a village of thatched roofed cottages, as tempting as glimpses through the frosty windows of the fruiterers or the pastry cook’s shop. It is a picture postcard view of London, at times painted by Charles Dickens to cheer his readers.

William of Stratford did not associate with political people who were allied to any cause. He did not move in the circles of Francis Bacon, the foremost student of knowledge who presented James I with his “Advancement of Learning’ in 1605, nor was he a Ralegh’s man.

Ralegh, the foremost explorer of the day, stripped of his office and his wealth, was confined to the Tower cell where he continued his chemistry research. Betrayed by his men at sea and condemned by his king, the man who was responsible for the printing of Spenser’s epic poem, ‘The Faerie Queene’, died on the block four years after the printing of his great volume, ‘The History of the World’.

The madrigal writer, Thomas Watson, came to Marlowe’s aid when he was accosted by Bradley in Hogs Lane near the ‘Theatre’ in Shoreditch. Bradley was killed by Watson’s sword and both Watson and Marlowe were sent into the depths of Newgate prison and all of that was over a bar bill of several pounds that Bradley, a vintner’s son, owned to another innkeeper, John Alleyn. Watson and Marlowe were totally uninvolved in the collection of the debt but both happened to pass by along this street. Death in the afternoon on Hog Lane, all because of a fourteen-pound tavern tab and because the two men happened to know the actor brother of the innkeeper. John Alleyne.

No description of this incident implies that there was even pushing and shoving. William Wayte did not try to enter the theatre when challenged but the biographers never miss a chance to attribute to ‘William’ great qualities for his actions at events where he was not even present. They neglect to assign the same laudations to Anne Lee and Dorothy Soer.

Continued to ripple through all his days

Clopton bridge is built with stone and it will last forever. Hugh Clopton built that bridge, a poor Stratford lad Who went away to London, there to make his fortune.

Clopton owned the fields and farms and the fields shall never die. Clopton ! What should be in that name; why should that name be sounded more than mine?

Shaxper ! There is a name to be emblazoned on an heraldic ‘coat o arms’. There was a Shaxper once who placed his mark on ev’ry page of documents in town.

Now all Stratford is beholden to him as he built the town, And there it stands today with Clopton House on Chapel Street They may well have called the Gild Church the Clopton Church For now he lies in Clopton Chapel. He built his Manor House and it will stand forever.

O What a falling off was there, then he and all of them fell down, Doomed for a certain term to walk in foul disgrace And waste away the years in strange and unnatural want of money And still the gravels dropped, Mortgages and Writs, Serpents that did sting his father’s life, the pressures put, secrets in his prison brain

Causing wave upon wave to follow him with his father’s constant voice: “Mark me ! Revenge my murdered sleep. Be resolute in your purpose. Follow to your own goal. Trace not mine. Beware of poverty. Sweep the table of your memory to wipe away all that youth and observation copied there. Be steadfast until they be purged away. List ! List ! Remember me!”

And their reverberations echo in his ear like a ghost. Some stones plunged into his life as rocks, Those yesterdays when his father’s fortune fell.

‘William’ never did anything that could be vaguely hinted at as suspect. Elizabeth the Queen was so enraged with suspicion, that John Hayward was implying that her temperament was like the disposition of Richard II when Hayward described it in his play, the ‘History of Henry IV’ that she committed him to the Tower and almost had him tried for treason and stretched on the rack to scream out a confession from him. Instead, she took it under advisement to keep him locked away for life.

William remembers the days of his youth, He remembers the Clopton bridge. Everyone knew that bridge, thousands crossed that bridge. Clop, clop, clop over Clopton bridge to get from here to Stratford.

William Shaxper, gent.! Man of property ! Never to want for barley or for malt. Fields to grow it and th’appurtenances to store it. Bread and Ale !, And troops of friends to call and say, “Master Shaxper, Loveinge good ffrend and countreymann, I am bolde of yowe as a ffrende, craveinge yowre helpe With Lxxx upon my securytee. May it please you”. A man of property, for property endureth forever. List ! Remember !

While authors and actors clanked their chains in London dungeons or spilled their blood on the stones of London Streets, William stepped lightly but firmly in those separate circles that he had determined for himself long ago in Stratford. The stones cast into the pool of his early life in Henley Street

Richard Quiney was elected only two years later as taster and constable, Then climbing to chamberlain, then alderman and then bailiff of all Stratford.

William remembers Richard Quiney as a young man, but six years older than he And newly married to Elizabeth Phillips, the daughter of a most respected man in Stratford.

“How much better the fun to stay out in the sunshine and breathe the clean air, To jostle and join with the crowds to watch jugglers And to laugh and lop balls at the balancing bear, And for those who come far to the travelling show, I’m sure I’d be able to bridle their horses, for a groat or a penny, To take all or any and lead their grey steeds to the trough or the stable.

Some players, by chance, might suggest that I step up with them and come up on the stage To strut an hour or two upon the boards, to speak aloud and to be a Royal Page, To wear gold roses and swing a sword but at a phantom foe. When blood is spill’d, it spurts in jest. When the dead do die, they do not go.”

“Now, how should I get there ? How should I attain it, That golden ring, by fair means to gain it. And not have a trade and not be a slave to a compass or blade. To And make gloves of lambskin for some moneyed numbskull, And to grovel to sell them to Sir Edward Greville ?

Hugh Clopton went off to London with nary a tie to keep him down. There would be no ties for William in London if all else stayed in Stratford Town.

Hugh Clopton had neither wife nor child ! William has a wife and three young babes !

To ever remember how I felt as a fool Before all my betters in that musty, constraining upper room at the school. How I hated those phrases, those tropes and to think Of the contempt that I held for that scratch of the quill and that damnable ink !”

To sew calfskin purses for only a pittance is an admittance That I have pricked and bloodied my thumb And have made myself wretched for a pitiful sum. Or should I be a printer chained to a press, Hemmed in all the Winter condemned to a room, My fingers and hands stained with those ink blots, My clothes in a mess while my mind is mixed in a box of lead letters.

William of the plain and, yes, untutored manner Would slip inside the City vaguely an unnoticed Crow, Yet rise to the adornments of red raiment And emerge as much worthy as a peacock in show.

Tut, within but a month with all of my pluck, I’d be all the talk around about Town.

William would follow every step of Hugh Clopton Through all the long journey to the City of London. Where Clopton had climbed his way very slowly High to the top as that City’s Lord Mayor, he would fashion each move In the same assured manner that old Clopton had done, With the same sweet natured mien, his dauntless jaunty air.

Quiney ! Bailiff ! What should be in that Quiney ? Shaxper is a finer name !

Could I do this and not with my luck to make half a crown ?

While I supplicate him with my untutored lines and sink upon one knee And play the fawning slave and do it wisely, To his most gracious noble self, the young Wriothesley. I shall offer some penned unpolished verse to lie among his books, Wherein I shall to him alone reveal That certain insights to his soul, his bare Achilles heel, Though shrouded from the rest of the unsuspecting throng, Are in secret held among the closed closets of my mind But to be locked away there long Or forever, if he may generously choose to find.”

Who was the largest land holder ? Hugh Clopton, of course, held title and deed. His holdings were there still for all to revere. He builded the Gild Hall and all that is here, The rooms for the preacher and rooms for the teachers, And the room for the Master to teach boys to read. When William moved his immediate family out of Henley Street into New Place in 1597, brother Gilbert was a haberdasher in London at the age of 31; Edmund at 17 may have stayed with his parents but there is no record of brother Richard, 23, continuing in is father’s trade of glover In 1601, William sublet the workshop on Henley Street to a vintner, Leslie Hiccox from the village of Welcome who converted it into ‘The Maidenhead Inn’. He lived out of town near Welcome where Mrs. Hiccox later roughed up her neighbour so rudely that she was served with a writ that begged Securities of the Peace.

How should I in this City find the open way, Lost as I am in these lane alley’d mazes ?

How should I keep upon that way and from it never once to stray ?

Why, to talk of fair young men with round purse heavy with coins to spend. Yet what is practiced by poor poets but to ply for a rich purs’d patron ?

Why should they bask beneath the kind benevolence of such a fop not I ?

Why, should there not be a pretty patron, then, for William ?

“What is the favourite fad of gamesome students at the Inn ?

I’ll seek out a noble beast of beauty and sing his praises, Court him, as is my duty, flatter him with immodest phrases. My dauntless mind over all mischance shall ride. My craving will not fail me but will triumph o’er my pride. Proud ambition will seize jupon impatience and revive my drooping hopes for me. Such a cause will fill mine eyes with humble looks

William would be a man of property but not of any common plot, Real property held in Stratford, not just a London lot.

“To take a damsel’s hairy hand and dance with shadowed shapes, Yet have no shadow fall upon my fair unsullied name, And as I play the villain, it is but a game, And when I drink the poison’d cup, they’ll clap their rough chapp’d hands And wave their caps for my brave acts and behave Like grateful knaves kneeling in the Strand. Then, when my sever’d head comes out atop a metal pole And steady stares at them with waxed wink and its soul cries out aloud, Then all my vile villanie finds its apt reward By all the pennies dropp’d by the roaring, sweating crowd.”

Ah, here is a fine young couple, Thomas Greene, a London barrister, newly moved to Stratford with his wife. Thomas has just been appointed as Town Clerk. William offers them rooms at New Place but for a price and they accept. They will be just around the corner from Thomas’ new office, close to the mercers, the apothecary on High street, and to Bayton’s shop should they need suger loaves or gun powder, and they will be just across Chapel Lane from the school. While the Greenes lived at New Place, their first child was born there in 1604. They called their daughter Anne. Today, throngs press in and crawl up the stairs to view the very room where Anne Greene was born. The estate that William bought on May 1, 1602, from William and John Combe, lay north of the town, west of the hamlet of Welcome. “William Shakespeare of Stratford vppon Avon, gentleman” bought the property and ‘thappertenaunces’ for 320 pounds. The conveyance was delivered to brother Gilbert who happened to be in town and since William was not in town. Gilbert signed for any necessary signature. William never signed anything but his will and for the deed to the property at Blackfriars in London which he mortgaged the following day. By that time, his hand, of course, was ‘shakey’.

Wait ! Hold !

Near the end of September in 1605, the Carews rented the Manor as a hunting lodge to one Ambrose Rokewood, a wealthy young man of twenty eight from Suffolk. He liked the old house and said that it would serve him well to entertain his guests who would, he expected, be many. He was a horseman and enjoyed gathering a group of his companions for the manly sport of men on speedy horses chasing a small lone fox across the fields and over fences with baying hounds at full swiftness until the red fox collapsed in the grass fully out of breath.

Where were these Combe fields that William now owned ? They bordered on the old Clopton land whereon stood the Clopton Manor House that still dominated the north horizon. This would forever be the Clopton Manor whoever stayed within its walls. At the time, one of the Clopton heiresses, Joyce Clopton, resided there with her husband, George Lord Carew.

There are many rooms going a begging upstairs without money coming in ?

Who else could buy houses with gardens for kin ? Why, William Combe and his son, John, They went to bed with their ‘stockynges’ on. They knew how to buy and they knew how to sell Malt in the bag and barley in the bin. Well, then, William would buy, but he would never sell. Corn he would sell, or barley or ale, But his property, ‘No, it would not be for sale’. Now he owned the Combe land and everything on it, And everyone on it rendered him honour or, at least, paid him rent. The Henley Street house would always remain to remind him of his bare boned beginnings But the Combe fields would yield him more corn tithes in pounds, those were his winnings.

John Shaxper died in 1601, but it is unknown if he and his wife had continued in Henley Street or if he moved in with William and Anne on High Street. William’s mother, Mary, died in 1608. William’s sister, Joan, however moved into the Henley house with her new husband, William Hart. It is logical that William’s parents and young Edmund stayed at Henley Street with Joan and her husband While William lived uptown at the fine old Clopton House where there is plenty of room for his wife and their two daughters, he charged his sister for living at the old house on Henley only a ‘nominal’ rent of 25s. That, too, seems logical, knowing William.

The silhouette of horses with their riders, gentlemen dismounting, attendants at their station, Stableboys taking reins, leading horses back and fading out of sight. The great dark door opening to a shaft of light, Then closing black as each man goes inside. More riders come and some, then, take their leave with steady muffled stride. But never are there any dogs tethered to the trees, Only riders in and out, alone, by twos or threes. So it is until the advent of Michaelmas when the night skies darken soon With a fearful foreboding, a scowling eclipse of the moon. This too soon is followed by an ever more hallowed, Portentous and leaded reddish brown dun In the doom filled heavens, the sullen eclipse of the sun. That Sunday, however, the Manor House brightened As spirits are heightened for a friendly and sumptuous fest. As the riders arrived and each goes inside, Ambrose solemnly reaches and clasps hands as he silently greets each guest. Then he grasps each man’s hand and shakes it again and, pausing, takes it again. As they stood in the hall, it is obvious to all that all of his guests are men. This distinguished group that stood gathered by Ambrose Rokewood Is imposingly led by a young country lad, Robert Catesby by name, the one and the same Who brings with him as he did promise His cousins, the Winters, both Robert and Thomas And are met there that night By John Percy and by his good friend John Wright And again by John’s brother, Christopher. Extending his warm and friendship hand among the murmurs and whispers, John Grant is standing inside the threshold and introducing Francis Tresham And the brothers Wright and the Winter brothers To Sir Everard Digby and to all of the others. From the dim and draughty hall, ten gentlemen in all walk in to dine. They seat themselves across the table Now that they are able to partake of the plates of food and cups of wine. They cross themselves and they pray before they dine. Ambrose at the table’s head carves the veal to pass it round. They break their bread together but other than the clinking cups, There is neither word nor sound. Then as each turns his head to one side or the other, Low speakers converse and merge friend to brother. As murmured words grow louder as one constantly interrupts, Those who speak with better points have their fingers prodding While rapt listeners lean in to hear, several impatiently nodding. Then each and all break out one cry. To the final point proposed, all shout out ‘Aye ! Aye!”

In the twilight of October days, Ambrose sets the Great Hunt in preparation.

But for the moment, none will know for all ten men, Amid their laughter breaking out with hurried shouts, The coughing, the clatter, the crackling of the fire, Reach out again and ring their cups the more, The din rising higher clangs like a grim and tolling tocsin, While Ambrose turns and goes to the door to let the eleventh man, Guy Fawkes, in !

The wood of the fire cracks and splutters, the only sound.

Within three months hence, each man of them in this room will die, For one who sits among them and looks to them eye to eye Will betray them with a written word and poison pen

The cup passes from man to man around.

And then he passes it ‘round to each man Who takes it reverently in both hands with a mumbled oath upon his lips, In the silence takes a solemn pause before he sips.

Firmly to his full height each man rises to stand and lift out his cup full reach And they clang their goblets each to each, But Ambrose raises his hand and takes one cup and fills it full with wine, And in the glow of firelight, holds it high to let it shine

Coleridge makes his observation that no great poet lacked being a profound philosopher.

Whenever another Elizabethan work comes upon the stage, the tendency is to believe that this author was following, imitating or copying William. Even his foremost biographer says: “In writing the play (Hamlet) Shakespeare was once more pitting himself against Marlowe, in this case, Edward the Second, in which Marlowe was following Shakespeare in exploring the English chronicles for a subject.”

The reverence for the ‘Bard’, built over five hundred years, has left the impression that William was completely original in the phrases, the manner of speech, the construction of sentences, the style, the lilt and the rhythm conveyed when the words are spoken aloud. Not that scholars and historians do not know that William did not invent blank verse, that all of the plays, with possibly one exception, are re writings of another’s work, that the words and phrases are typical of that time, they do, but they still bolster the impression that all was unique to William.

George Bernard Shaw finds nothing in the plays but the most mundane expressions.

when one asks despairingly why our stage should ever have been cursed with this ‘immortal’ pilferer of other men’s stories and ideas, with his monstrous rhetorical fustian, his unbearable platitudes, his pretentious reduction of the subtlest problems of life to commonplaces against which a Polytechnic debating club would revolt, his incredible unsuggestiveness, his sententious combination of ready reflection with complete intellectual sterility, and his consequent incapacity for getting out of the depth of even the most ignorant audience, except when he solemnly says something so transcendently platitudinous that his more humble-minded hearers cannot bring themselves to believe that so great a man really meant to talk like their grandmothers. With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.”

“SHAKE SPURIOUS” Robert J. Meyer Interest in the ‘Plays’ receives another re birth in the latter half of the 19th century, when they become favourites with poets and writers Alfred Lore Tennyson’s favourite play is ‘Cymbeline’. Matthew Arnold considers that William “out topped” knowledge.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge calls him “myriad minded” John Dryden sees him “naturally learned”; scholars find “profound symbolism, based on deep reflection”.Thereseems to be on the part of the poets no deep reflection on how much time would be necessary for this profound symbolism, while “acting, directing, producing’ and writing events of history with his mind and hand going together with no need of ‘spectacles of books” as DrydenYetsaid.someone finally does some ‘deep reflecting’ on September 22, 1896. It takes him only as long as the duration of the Lyceum production of ‘Cymbeline’, the current favourite of Baron Tennyson. That playgoer and theatrical reviewer is George Bernard Shaw who writes “It is for the most part stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order, in parts abominably written, throughout intellectually vulgar, and foolish, offensive, indecent and exasperating beyond all “Theretolerance.”aremoments

Dr Tilliard of Cambridge says that William was “a poet more rather than less like Dante and Milton in massiveness of intellect and powers of reflection”

The last sentence recalls Artemidorus in ‘Julius Caesar’ while reading his paper. “Beware of Brutus, take heed of Cassius. Come not near Casca’ have an eye to Cinna’. Trust not Trebonius, mark well Metellus Cimber...”

That audience is not aware while in the theatre that these precepts have been uttered and written down many times before, some in phrases not unlike this text in ‘Hamlet’. When William Cecil, Lord Burlegh was preparing his son, Robert Cecil, to succeed him as the Secretar y of State to Queen Elizabeth and later to James the First, he had a few precepts for him which ended:“Towards thy superior, be humble, yet generous. with thine equals, familiar, yet respective, towards thine inferiors show much humanity, and some familiarity: as to bow the body, stretch forth the hand and uncover the head with such like popular compliments. Yet, I advise thee not to affect, or neglect, popularity too much. Seek not to be Essex; shun to be Ralegh.”

“Now there is not a breath of medieval atmosphere in Shakespear’s histories. His John of Gaunt is like a study of the old age of Drake. Although he was a Catholic by family tradition, his figures are all intensely Protestant, individualist, sceptical, self centred in everything but their love affairs, and completely personal and selfish even in them. His kings are not statesmen, his cardinals have no religion; a novice can read his plays from one end to the other without learning that the world is finally governed by forces expressing themselves in religions and laws which make epochs rather than by vulgarly ambitious individuals who make rows.”

Would the audience attending the ‘War of the Roses’ realize they were witnessing an age in which England was developing a language of its own, building an industrious country of shopkeepers, crafts and arts that were combining the skills of immigrants into an English art; cities rising with English cathedrals ?

Is it not remarkable how old Lord Burlegh imitated passages that had not yet been written ? Burlegh pirated them, ‘no doubt’.

It is the actor upon the stage who entrances the listener with the conviction of the words however unoriginal. To the early 17th century playgoer, it was not Richard the Third who died upon the stage, it was Richard Burbadge who personified Richard in voice and manner.

Would they know it was Chaucer’s England ? Shaw’s observation that the kings were not statesmen and the cardinals were not of religion and all were ‘Protestants’ may have been the result of the plays being authored by someone who was a free thinker and one who did not have the usual blindfold covering his eyes when looking at cardinals and kings. He could have been a Ralegh’s man, one who wanted to portray his present Queen’s ancestors on a bleak, unadorned stage with their true characters presented finally in a glaring, all revealing light.

Where does it state in history that ‘the Author’ “was a Catholic by family tradition” ?

Now, this man knows that Christopher Marlowe wrote ‘Edward the Second’ and other histories from the Chronicles long before the name, ‘Shake speare’, ever appeared printed on anything, yet he positively states that Marlowe followed William’s example. The biographer also must know that Marlowe ‘died’ in June of 1593 and no one had seen the name ‘Shakespeare’ beforeThe1594.audience that listens enraptured in the dark while on stage Polonius, the wise old man, counsels his son: “Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar, give every man thine ear, but few thy voice, Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgement...”

George Bernard Shaw wrote in this preface to his ‘Saint Joan’: -

There is no evidence that William even knew Drayton. Numerous illustrious people were often in the district of Stratford, many were patients of Dr Ward, but no person is recorded as visiting William either at Stratford or at London, nor had Jonson or his biographer friend mentioned Jonson having stopped off at Stratford to visit anyone, yet Burgess says of Jonson:

total speculation upon a meeting that never happened, the old Bogies of the Victorian Age are revived in 1970, of the dangers of daring to step outside into the ‘dank humours of the night-air’ to bid friends adieu on an evening late in April ‘where you will catch your death of cold’ ! O to be in England now that April’s there !

The story does not include any of the actors from the playhouse as their names are beyond rec**all after fifty years. No, only the finest threads are chosen by the dream weavers for their tapestry portraits, William no longer referred to as an actor but a ‘master poet’, so this fable contains 43 year old Jonson who lived to be 65, and the poet Drayton, who was 53 at this date and lived to the age of 68, while William is considered to be ‘old’, ‘tired, ‘overworked’ and ‘rapidly failing’ at 52 ! Anthony Burgess elaborates on this tale as if it came from a reliable contemporary source: “He was tired with a life’s overwork, depressed about his daughter’s marriage”. Both of these statements are totally unfounded but both are repeated from previous legends.

“Shakespeare ate too many pickled herrings and drank too much Rhenish wine. He sweated, took cold and died. If the cause of death was really over-indulgence, then Dr Hall was showing proper discretion in making no entry about it in his case book.”

“He may have drunk with abandon, encouraged by Ben.”

Why would Ben Jonson do this to the man he is supposed to have admired ‘this side idolatry’?“..then sweated in a hot room, walked out hatless and cloakless to speed his guests on their way, pooh poohing warnings of the danger of a chill April night. A quick attack of pneumonia...”Besidesbeing

“I am ready to accept ...that Drayton and Ben assisted at a vinous session of nostalgia… Drayton was often in the district.”

Even in the ‘enlightened’ days of the second half of the 20th century, biographers of William continued to construct their fabrications on the old framework of false fragments of the past fusing them with still more pure fantasy. Near the conclusion of his biography of the ‘Poet’ ‘Shakespeare’ of 1970, the British novelist Anthony Burgess says of the final days of William of Stratford whom he believes to be the man who wrote Hamlet: “The end came in April 1616. The Rev. John Ward’s notebooks tell of a ‘merrie meeting’ with Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson”. Ward is the only source for this hearsay of 1662, a half century after the presumed event. In this yarn, the names of the most popular dramatist, Ben Jonson, and the most famous poet of the time, Drayton, are gathered together as companions with whom William ‘drank too hard and died of a fever’, but Reverend Ward does not say where he heard this, certainly not from his proposed meeting not fulfilled with William’s daughter Judith, he just relates it as being factual.

As if no mention in the case book of his son in law could not indicate that nothing of the kind occurred as the date of 1616 is the time of Stratford William’s demise not ‘Shake speare’s !

To say that almost all Elizabethans lived an exceedingly public life must be based upon the assumption that there is not an exceeding number of people who live in the Old City but the streets of London in 1600 are clogged with people. Chepesyde is lined with closely constructed buildings two or three stories high and the walkways are thronged with jostling masses going about their daily business. The population of London is estimated at 120,000 in 1583 and 200,000 in 1603, an average increase during these twenty years of 4000 people yearly. London is much respected and feared by the powerful countries of France and Spain because London can raise an army of roustabouts in a shorter time than any country on the continent.

Another biographer says: “But Shakespeare was a hard working player, and, like other players and almost all Elizabethans or Jacobeans, lived an exceedingly public life.”

Then Ben postponed his journey to visit his good friend in Scotland for two years because he was so ‘discouraged’ by the demise of someone of whose passing neither Jonson nor anyone else ever mentioned or mourned at the time. There is not a single item recorded by anyone on the death of William Shaxper of Stratford. There is no entry in any English city’s records of a birth, a marriage or a death of a ‘William Shakespeare’.

“He walked to Scotland in 1618 and may have started a walk in 1616. Stratford would be a natural calling place. Discouraged by Will’s death, he may have ridden back to London and postponed his weight-reducing feat.”

William Shaxper would have lived a more public life in Stratford where everyone knew him and his family all of his life than he would have in London where he is just one of a teeming populace. London City knew William Shaxper for only seventeen years and in that time, he may have lived in Shoreditch Street outside the walls of the city. Later, he may have lived on the short street of Great St Helen’s just north of Bishopsgate. If he were the person of the same name lodging there, he has been taxed five shillings on goods valued at five pounds, but the collector of unpaid taxes reports in 1597 that he was “Dead, departed or gone out of the sayde warde of St Helen’s.”They cannot find him, this person who is supposed to have “lived an exceedingly public life”. In 1598, the amount owing was forwarded for tax collecting in the Liberty of the Clink where this William was thought to be living in Southwark across the Thames, a long walk to the City over crowded London Bridge or by a paid trip across the river. However, this was found later to be another forgery to establish that ‘Shake speare’ lived in London. After 1602, Shaxper does live in the far northwest corner of the city in the garret above the shop of the wigmaker, Mountjoy, only a five minute walk from the Mermaid Tavern.

Why does this author make the exception of “his fellow craftsmen”, the ‘player’ of whom there is no evidence, neither of Stratford Shaxper or the name ‘Shake speare” ?

In a ‘Stratford Edition Series’, an unnamed biographer writes: “Of his eminent countrymen Raleigh, Sidney, Bacon, Cecil, Walsingham, Coke, Camden, Hooker, Drake, Hobbes, Inigo Jones, Herbert of Cherbury, Laud, Pym, Hampden, Selden, Walton, Wooton and Donne may be properly reckoned as his contemporaries, and yet there is no evidence whatever that he was personally known to any of these men, or to any others of less note among the statesmen, scholars, soldiers and artists of his day, except a few of his fellow craftsmen . . and he left no trace upon the political or even the social life of his era.”

There stands the revolutionary John Donne, Beautiful yet and dazzling at thirty-one. Great London edifices endure through ages Architecturized by one in bricks and stones. His name is carved on the Mermaid wall: ‘Here sits Inigo Jones’.

There, in the stall holding the half filled vessel, young Francis Beaumont. You know his ‘Knight of the Burning Pestle’ ?

Or perhaps you’ve read his ‘The Woman Hater’ ?

He’s mulling over the wine he nurses in the alabaster pitcher With his partner in crime of dramatical comical scenes in lyric blank verses. Yea, that is the dramaturge, young John Fletcher. But tarry, more members will come to the Mermaid later.

To see where all the illustrious poets came In well-content comraderie And did their new made madrigals sing To hear the low beamed rafters ring with roistrous laughter And stout cheers for those new sonnets read, As pewter pots of ale and cheese and new baked bread

Who ? You don’t see whom here ? No, you must be thinking of another pub, No one here called.....what was it again ? William Shakespeare ? There’s no one known by that name here. No, he was never a member of the Mermaid Club.

Entering now is Michael Drayton, gazetteer of Polyoblion, With him, doctor, lawyer, musical poet, champion of this moment, Thomas Campion.

The Mermaid Tavern ! O the Mermaid ! O that name !

Wait, now . . here he comes in all good humour, In it or out of it, Jonson’s the cleverest one. No doubt of it, he is the pride of every jolly gentleman That’s no rumour! That’s our Ben !

Filled the board until another man enthused Would rise and take the floor and tell them all the welcome news Of his latest penned and tragic play And to the noisy, jostling swarm he would propose That all should go the morrow’s day To see and hear his thoughts performed Across the Thames at the Swan or Rose. Again today whoever goes to that same pub, The one on Chepesyde where the Mermaid Club still meets, Meets still, as ghosts. The membership’s the same, They all will be your eager hosts. Still illustrious is each name Though now they are five centuries old, That ‘sirenaical’ fraternity, those gentle men still hold Us with all their memorial words on faded pages !

“Yes, Mr Carlyle, he was kind enough to write this letter of introduction and, of course, he recommended you highly as one who would be most interested in my mission to England.”

“And you won ! Excellent ! Poor Edgar, he lived just along the way. Died four years ago, very young. I miss him still. And you know Emerson, do you ? Life long friend is Ralph.”

“Pen name ? !!”

“Do you mean to say that Ben Jonson, and Heminges and Condell and all the Shakespeare scholars since, were wrong about the authorship, and YOU are going to set them right ?”

“You must be referring, Sir, to the occasion when one of my short stories was entered into a competition where Edgar Allen Poe also entered ”

“In every reference that I have been able to find, Mr Carlyle, there is not a shred of evidence that anyone knew who he actually was, least of all that person that lies buried at Stratford. Oh, they all talk as if he can be no other, but not one of them has definitely stated that they knew the man personally nor have they identified Stratford Willy as the one and only man who could have written the words of those plays, only a few of which were ever associated with that pen name before First Folio.”

“For that is all it possibly could be. The greatest mystery to me is why anyone least of all you, Mr Carlyle, who understands how difficult it is to compose a literate line of prose without the fullest reverence of the contents of books of the past and the deepest immersion in the meaning of their language could believe for a moment that Stratford Willy wrote Hamlet. I very much doubt if the man so now idolized could write more than his scribbled name as we all have witnessed and I am sure he never as much as owned a book.”

“I am, and as much as I respect you, Mr Carlyle, I must tell you that you do not know what is really in the plays if you believe that that booby wrote them.”

“My dear Miss Bacon, welcome to my house. Jane, would you prepare tea for our guests. This is Mr James Spedding. As you may know, he is the editor of the work of your illustrious ancestor Sir Francis. And I understand that you have inherited no small amount of that facility in that you have out done one of our own.”

“And that concerns your research into the life of our great poet Shakespeare ?”

In the year 1853, three years before the birth of George Bernard Shaw, a descendant of the Elizabethan statesman, Sir Francis Bacon, the American author, Delia Salter Bacon, sails to England for a crucial meeting with England’s most respected historian and essayist, Thomas Carlyle, known as the ‘Sage of Chelsea’, that unique section of South London which has attracted famed writers of poetry and prose, dramatists and artists to live in picturesque cottages and terraces along the Thames River’s storied streets.

THE SHAXPER OF DELIA BACON Robert J. Meyer

On June 10th, Delia Bacon’s carriage turns off Cheyne Walk and comes to the door of 24 Cheyne Row, where the great minds of Europe and England have entered to pay their respects to and match wits with Thomas Carlyle and to avoid, if they can, his domineering disposition and frequent outbursts of temper.

“Not know the plays ! Jane ! Collect the teacups ! Miss Bacon is finished and is about to leave this house! Pure heresy, I say. Such gibberish nonsense as I have never heard. Is this some wicked joke that Emerson is trying me with ? Good day to you, I cannot say that it has been a pleasure. I am a man of infinite patience as you know, James, but have you ever heard such balderdash ? And to me, to me, James !”

Puzzled by this, James Wilmot makes an arduous search of the area about Stratford for any books or papers that could have belonged to William Shakespeare but that eventually found their way into the libraries of the learned gentry who would have kept their libraries and bequeathed them to their heirs. He examines private book shelves for a distance of fifty miles in every direction from Stratford hoping to find at least a few papers written by the Master Poet who, he reasons, must have used a quarter million sheets of paper and he is baffled as to why he can find nothing. From reading the letters and papers that he did find in private libraries, he can only conclude that in his own day and in his own county William of Stratford was not known to people of Wilmotrank.is led to suspect that Sir Francis Bacon was the true author and to explain the absence of any books or papers, he can only conclude that Bacon had deliberately destroyed all traces to distance himself from the lowly art of the theatre. Only Wilmot’s closest friends hear from him this strange theory as he is rightly terrified that his reputation would be derided to shreds if scholars knew of his factual findings. Years later, he gives his housekeeper a final order.“Burn

all the bags and boxes of writings that you can discover in the cabinets in my bedroom.”Theonly reason that Wilmot’s writing is known is that on a similar search for biographical material, James Corton Cowell visited the same area in 1805. He wrote of this:

Quite unknown to Delia Bacon, another but true first person to approach the identity of William Shakespeare with an open mind and with some physical effort is the Reverend James Wilmot, Fellow of Trinity College who retires to become rector of Barton on the Heath in 1781 after an active life as a literary figure in the best of London society.

James Wilmot is completely aware of the impossibility of introductions to influential people both in Elizabeth’s day and in his own without high recommendation and the difficulty in a poet’s attracting a sponsor or patron. He estimates that the author of the Plays had twice the vocabulary in 1600 that Dr Samuel Johnson has in this year of 1781.

While living in London, he has known the greatest names of his time. His friends are the parliamentarian, Edmund Burke, the novelist Laurence Sterne, the actor David Garrick and the editor of the great Plays, Dr Samuel Johnson.

Being retired in Warwickshire, Wilmot is encouraged by a London bookseller to write a biography of William, but as familiar as he thought he may be about his favourite Plays, he realizes that he knows very little about the man, the Author. He searches the very few skimpy existing biographies including the brief Life recently written by his friend Dr Samuel Johnson and is surprised to learn that William of Stratford was in Wilmot’s words: “At best, a Country clown at the time he went to seek his fortune in London...that he could never have had any school learning, and that fact would render it impossible that he could be received as a friend and equal by those of culture and breeding who alone could by their intercourse of ideas make up for the deficiencies of his youth.”

As the door slams, Delia hears the risible laughter of derision that echoes in the little room where Browning has read his poems and only the padding on the strings of the little piano that Chopin has played prevents it from quivering in harmonic empathy to the howls within.

No contemporary person left any statement saying that he knew ‘Shake speare’ personally.

The sum of 26s 8p to these men is not unique. Such a bequest is also made in the will for William Raynolds who is also written in later. The same bequest is made for Richard Tyler but his name has been crossed out and the name ‘Hamlett Sadler’ is written in above. This insertion of the name ‘Sadler’ is quite odd as he is a witness to the will and so he should not benefit in the will, and whoever inserted his name demonstrated how little he knew. Sadler’s name was not ‘Hamlett’ but Hamnet as everyone in Stratford knew and Sadler clearly signs himself ‘Hamnet’ as a witness to the will.

“Everywhere was I met by a strange and perplexing silence until as a guest at the house of James Wilmot, I am informed confidentially of Wilmot’s belief in Bacon as the author. Later, I gave two addresses to my local Ipswich Philosophic Society in which I told the story and theory as it was related to me, but naming Wilmot only in the second address after dutifully swearing my listeners to silence on the entire affair.”

“Of his eminent countrymen Raleigh, Sidney, Bacon, Cecil, Walsingham, Coke, Camden, Hooker, Drake, Hobbes, Inigo Jones, Herbert of Cherbury, Laud, Pym, Hampden, Selden, Walton, Wooton and Donne may be properly reckoned as his contemporaries, and yet there is no evidence whatever that he was personally known to any of these men, or to any others of less note among the statesmen, scholars, soldiers and artists of his day, except a few of his fellow craftsmen . . and he left no trace upon the political or even the social life of his era.”

Particularly, not the two members of the Burbadge acting company, Heminges and Condell, whose names are printed under the Dedication in the Folio of Plays. Nowhere in this Dedication, addressed to the Earl of Pembroke and to the Earl of Montgomery, does either actor specifically say that he knew the man personally. The two only references are to ‘Shake speare’, not to William Shakespeare and although one reference says ‘only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare’ since the two Earls are being addressed, the friendship can be assumed to the Earls but not to Heminges or Condell. The Earls were known only to have shown a likeness for some of the included plays, but not ever to have acknowledged a friendship with their author. Were not Heminges and Condell mentioned in the well documented will of William of Stratford in 1616 ? Heminges, Condell and Burbadge are each to be given 26s 8p for remembrance rings, but this entry is inserted between the original lines, but when was it written in, before the Shaxper signature or after it was signed ? Was it written in later years long after the Folio appeared publicly in London making the names Heminges and Condell the most well known, possibly the only known actors of the company besides Richard Burbadge.

If the ‘Heminge and Condell’ entry was made long after the signing of the will, the sum was copied by the forger to be sure to be authentic in the amount which may not have been otherwise known to the writer. The false writer would also assume, and correctly, that since their names were in the Folio, these two men must have been living at the time of the will in 1616, but what he and ‘all the scholars since’ may not have realized is that the names were first printed not in the First Folio of 1623 but in the Second Folio of 1632 long after the two men had died ! The text above the names ‘Heminge and Condell’ is not in the simple language of two unschooled actors but, rather, has all the appropriate phrasings of the playwright Ben Jonson who was still alive in 1632 ! Nor did Ben Jonson ever say that he knew the man or that he had met the man or that he knew who this Shakespeare was !

In 1932, Professor Allardyce Nicoll publishes an article in which he relates his discovery of these two addresses in the University of London Library. In a ‘Stratford Edition Series’ an unnamed biographer writes of ‘Shake speare’, whoever he actually was:

“Of Shakespeare biography in particular there has been a flood over the last few decades, good, bad and indifferent. Given this ignorance, most biography either brings into play data which is tendentious to suppose relevant to him at all, or it makes more and more remarkable use of fiction (and this is true even of scholarly seeming quasi factual accounts).”

“Much of the new scholarship in Shakespeare biography; is fiction. “Shakespeare’s London” is a clear case in point. The poet’s work gives no sense that his mind inhabited London as does the writing of John Donne, Samuel Johnson and Charles Lamb. Ben Jonson and T.S. Eliot are urban poets as ‘S’ never was.” “But it was the small town that he returned to. [Stratford Shaxper] His mind and his rooted loyalties were nourished in an earth of rural past and future, not by immediacy; of London streets.”

“Much of the new scholarship in Shakespeare biography is fiction. ‘Shakespeare’s London’ is a clear case in point. The poet’s work gives no sense that his mind inhabited London as does the writing of John Donne, Samuel Johnson and Charles Lamb. Ben Jonson and T.S. Eliot are urban poets as Shakespeare never was.”

“But it was the small town that he returned to. His mind and his rooted loyalties were nourished in an earth of rural past and future, not by immediacy, of London streets.”

Again this commentator follows many others as she admits that she could not know that John always singed himself as ‘Heminges’ and that these two remaining players had no hand in the ‘editing’ of the texts or a trip to the printer.

After giving two excellent observances, Everett still relies solely on the ‘Stratford moniment’ words to continue the belief in Shaxper as in her statement, “He saved and invested wisely” referring to what is known of ‘Shaxper’. There is no document to say what ‘the Poet’ earned or saved. “As the dead poet’s friends and editors, John Heminge and Henry Condell, said in the Folio, ‘Reade him, therefore’.”

“Shakespeare never brought himself to publish his own Sonnets. The odd title of ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ cannot have emanated directly from the poet himself.”

Most if not all of the ‘Shakespeare’ biographers of the 20th century steadfastly held that the greatest poet in the entire history of England was the man from Stratford, who was born in 1564, and that all of the ‘traditional’ stories of ‘Shakespeare’ are true, and, unfortunately, that these and other inventions are still present in the many biographers and commentators of the 21st century as the book reviewer, Barbara Everett states in the Times Literary Supplement of August 17, 2007.

“Shakespeare never brought himself to publish his own Sonnets. The odd title of ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ cannot have emanated directly from the poet himself.”

The Chandos (1600 10), the Soest (c1667), the Sanders (young) (1603) Janssen (c1610) Flower (1620 40) and Grafton… all pointed beards but all “discernibly upper class”

“Only two authenticated images of the poet have survived. One is the engraving by Martin Droeshout which prefaces the First Folio. The other is the bust of [by] Gerard Johnson in Shakespeare’s parish church at Stratford-upon-Avon. An extraordinary large number of viewers, at different periods, have condemned both engraving and bust as horribly disappointing; the only exception to them is the historian A. L. Rowse, who lauds the engraving in the highest terms as a noble portrait of genius. John Dover Wilson said that the bust is the picture of a local pork butcher.”“Some half dozen candidates for glory have been put forward, led by the ‘Chandos’ and the ‘Grafton” portraits.” ‘

The first ‘portrait’ was presented to London by the man who is responsible for the revival of the ‘Plays’ in 1660, Sir William Davenant, who alone brought the Plays out of total obscurity. No letter written by either the Poet or by the Stratford Shaxper has ever been found.

The plays that were written since 1587 were particularly new to London society and they were devastating in the power upon the common man. For the first time in English history, great events were re enacted upon the stages and in the Inn courtyards and then taken to the open areas in small towns and villages that had seen little more than travelling magic shows or juggling acts.

Thomas Nashe was vividly describing the effect upon the audience in his ‘Pierce Pennilesse’ of the play that he had seen called ‘Harry vj’ [Henry vi]. Reproduced in a modern book is a picture of a page from Philip Henslowe’s diary of the plays presented at his ‘Rose’ theatre during the months of February and March of 1591. The heading at the top of the page tells that they were acted out by Lord Strange’s Men. Plays were presented at the Rose on the days of the 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 28, and 29th of February. Yes, the listing is for the 29th of February 1591, a year not devisable by four as in that time, February was still in 1590. Performances continued on the 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12th of March 1591 [1590]. On the 3rd, 7th and 11th of March, the play presented was ‘Harry the vj’. Christopher Marlowe wrote ‘Harry the vj’. The book, ‘Shakespeare and his World’, 1956, by F.E. Halliday, describes this entry as ‘The first record of a performance for a Shakespeare play, Henry VI, Part I’. The box office receipts from the March 3rd performance totalled 3 pounds, 16, shillings and 8 pence.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE YEARS 1591 1593 Robert J. Meyer

The ‘mystery’ of the Plays must centre around what happened during the years 1591 through 1593 within the world of London, in the intrigues of the Court, the political and religious rivalries, the free thinking factions of Walter Ralegh, the conversations at the Mermaid Tavern, the broadsides distributed around the city, notices tacked upon doors, the pamphlets passed around ‘exposing abuses’ and the plays that came before the Council authorities for censure.

Hesketh Pearson is a most honoured biographer of more than twenty illustrious people in English history. He was an actor and member of Beerbohm Tree’s company and the Secretary of the British Empire Shakespeare Society. These important years of 1591 1693 are referred to in chapter three of Pearson’s book on William. At the end of chapter two, he had been mentioning the year 1594 when ‘Willobe his Avisa’ appeared in print. He begins his third chapter saying that William was laughing at his own Sonnets in Love’s Labour’s Lost, written just before this time in 1594. Pearson then says: “But much had happened to the poet in the three years’ interval between his first batch of sonnets and his second: he had been improving the dramas of other men, had written comedies of his own, and had aroused the envy of another playwright. Also, during that period, Marlowe had flashed across the literary sky like a comet.”

At first, plays about great figures in world history brought heroes and villains to life so that the common man could witness Tamburlaine ‘in person’, then they could see figures of fantasy as Dr Faustus, and believe that they did live. From their own experience, they could know that Mephistopheles was real. The Devil himself walked and talked verily before their eyes. Theatre became a powerful voice. It was one thing to have stories told on stage of ancient Grecians and Romanes but now they could see and hear a Mongol murderer or an alchemist who ‘sold his very soul to the Devil’, but what if the stories were close to home, how would the populace react to the ancestors of the Royal Queen being enacted o’er, the stages of the city strewn with Royal murders, English souls sold for a Crown ? What of the men who were their own masters, those gentlemen of the Court, or of the Inns of Court, lawyers and students, all of whom divide their pleasure times between gaming, drinking or following of harlots, who could now allocate some of that idle time to seeing a play and, as Thomas Nashe pointed out, they could number ten thousand spectators who would embalm their brave Talbot’s bones with their tears when ‘they imagine they behold him fresh bleeding’ ?

In this one sentence, Pearson has succinctly summed up the entire foundation for the case of William. It is what most biographers say about William during his ‘early years’ and it is almost the same phrases used by the 19th century biographer who stated that since he wrote the Plays, then he must have been an actor, a re writer of plays, an amender, an augmenter, a corrector, all of which is enlarged to a director of plays, a drama coach, a speech coach and on to be theatre owner and finally owner of ‘Shakespeare’s Company’. Once this has been established and taken for granted, the reverse logic appears: since he did all of this therefore, he must have written the Plays. It is only natural to assume that what Pearson has said is true. What is so unusual about someone taking some plays left by a playwright who is now dead and re writing them into new versions ? It was and is done all the time, nothing unusual about this whatever, so what is the contradiction ? Exactly, the biographer gives one item of information about William and the reader assumes the rest. However, the biographer may have mentioned some particular missing information in another book, he has not directly mentioned it in this book. Pearson has stated that William re wrote these plays of Marlowe during the years 1590 and 1591, but he has not mentioned that Marlowe was alive and well and writing plays in London and defending himself from a sword attack in the streets and spending time in Ludgate prison and chatting with Ralegh and staying at Walsingham’s estate until 1593. Knowing that Marlowe was ‘dead’ sometime during those years, the reader assumes that Marlowe is out of the picture when Pearson does not mention exactly when he died and believes everything this distinguished author states and thus assumes that Marlowe is dead and his plays are available to anyone in 1590 If Pearson had reminded his readers that Marlowe was alive until 1593, his entire statements would be revealed as deceit and William could not have been re-writing Marlowe’s plays thus destroying all that he has said as ‘make believe’. A hack writer having possession of Marlowe’s plays, rewriting them and putting them on the public stage supposedly under his own name without a word from Marlowe or from any of his fellow playwrights ? This would have to occur over a period of many months. Plays at this time in the absence of copyright laws are supposed to be closely guarded, making only one theatre copy so that no one, printer, publisher or plagiarist could get his pen picking fingers on them. To stage these plays, crediting them to anyone but Marlowe, is incredible but Pearson, the honoured biographer and Secretary to the British Empire Shake scene Society says this without a word of chastisement, for Pearson is an honourable man, so are they all, all honourable men

The ‘three years’ interval would necessarily be 1591 to 1593. Those are years during which Marlowe is to have ‘flashed across the literary sky’. Marlowe made his great theatrical flash with ‘Tamburlaine’ in the summer of 1587, followed by ‘Tamburlaine Part II’ and in the Armada year of 1588, Marlow had his “Massacre in Paris’ staged. Both plays appeared during and throughout the summer and fall of 1588. There followed his ‘Doctor Faustus’ and, in 1589, he completed ‘The Jew of Malta’ that was immensely popular as late as 1592 when on a Saturday, the play brought in three times the amount of money of the previous Saturday‘s play and more than the previous six plays. The play’s 1633 Quarto printing begins: “This play, composed by so worthy an author as Master Marlowe and the part of the Jew by so inimitable an Actor as Master Alleyne.” These plays were reflecting the literary sky long before 1591-3. Marlowe followed these with ‘Arden of Faversham’ and ‘Edward II’. Now Pearson continues by telling what William was doing in these three years: “The first work Shakespeare did for the stage was hack work. He reshaped and largely re wrote three plays by Marlowe on the Wars of the Roses, slicing out passages and scenes, altering characters, putting in chunks of his own here and there, changing the details and transforming the whole; so that the three parts of Henry VI (1590 1) especially the second and third, may almost be regarded as an original work, Shakespeare’s earliest attempt at drama.”

Pearson at least says that the author of Henry VI follows closely Holinshed’s Chronicles account, the second edition of 1587, even to the misprints, but Pearson says that this is to be expected from a man who scorned scholarship that he seems to admire and that William had bought a copy of the second edition of the Chronicles. This does not signify non scholarship, and his purchase is unfounded and is an assumption only. Five other plays are attributed to ‘William’ during this short period and it is a matter of which scholar’s opinion as to the order of their appearances.Pearson says that William ‘tinkered’ with two more plays before starting on this own: “The Taming of the Shrew, which derives from an earlier play he may have touched up called ‘The Taming of a Shrew’, a skit on Marlowe.” [Is this a misprint for ‘of Marlowe’?] The other play was ‘Titus Andronicus’. Thomas Kyd wrote a play called ‘Titus Andronicus’. Now William is re writing plays by Marlowe and Kyd and nothing is said about them by either playwright ? The biographers would now say that someone did say something, fellow playwright Robert Greene, who addressed Marlowe Nashe and Peele in his ‘Groatsworth’. Most biographers continue to repeat the allegation that Greene is referring to William as a playwright, and if not as well, an actor, in his ‘attack’ that he wrote Pearson makes these statements about Groatsworth’ that others have repeated since: that ‘This envious attack cut Shakespeare to the quick’, but no one has revealed any opinion expressed by William; that Greene was charging the new actor with earning constant money by ‘bombasting’ out the words of his social and intellectual superiors, the play writers.

The accuracy of these years is critical to the argument of the authorship of the Plays. The dates for the three parts of ‘Henry VI’ are given as 1590 91 with the footnote that these play dates have been determined in retrospect partly by their style and partly by ‘external circumstances’ and that they are ‘approximate’. They cannot be earlier as they contain information not available before that date. If the dates for these plays were three years later, it would mean that other plays would have later dates and Andronicus, Errors, Verona and Shrew would pile up against the known date of ‘Loues Labore Lost’ increasing the improbability of all of these plays being written in too short a time by one ‘person’ who had not written plays or poetry or anything else beforehand. If these plays were found to be written just past 1592, only a matter of three years, there would be an additional three years added to the problematical question of what was ‘William’ doing all of this time. This narrow range of approximation is critical in that the closer the dates are to December 1592, the higher the incredibility becomes that someone happened along and eclipsed another’s reputation that otherwise would have ‘shone like a star down the centuries‘ with ‘the proud full sail of his great verse’ by writing the same type of plays in the same style that was never written by Englishmen before and quite unlike the work of any other contemporary writer of 1591 to 1593

Pearson also says: “Greene advised them to drop play writing if they did not wish to starve, because the actors no longer wanted their work, having got one of their own to fulfil their requirements”.Greene’s attack did not arise from envy, and certainly not envy of someone else writing plays and he did not use the word ‘wit’ as many of the biographers have used it by referring to Marlowe, Nashe, Peele and ‘Greene as ‘the University Wits’ implying the reverse snobbery of ‘scholarship’ or ‘ivory tower dwellers’.

There is nothing in Greene’s ‘Groatsworth’ to indicate that the ‘upstart Crow’ was William. If the real Crow was ‘cut to the quick’ or took exception to the printed remark as referring to him, that is his interpretation. If he took exception that is very odd as did he himself happen to read this printed book as this would be a one hundred to one chance occurrence

If William was ‘cut to the quick’ about this vague reference, he must have been unusually thin skinned although nowhere else did he ever complain about any improper reference to him although the exception may be Jaggard’s printing of two of the Sonnets, where Heywood claims that “The author I know much offended with M, Jaggard that presumed to make so bold with his name” in a book that credited to him many poems that were not his and is itself also unusual as he made no protest against Thorpe’s printing all of the Sonnets while supposedly protesting Jaggard’s printing of two Sonnets according to Heywood only.

There were pamphlets and broadsides aplenty being printed and available wherever stationers set up their tables in the churchyards or in the market places. “We printers are called upon to publish so much news of everything.” “Marvayle it is, how that our wittes can last’, said one printer, or did another person spot this obscure item which is only a small part of a large treatise by Greene, and did this other person rush down to the theatre and say, ‘Gadzooks, Will, someone doth pull thy beard, marry, he hast thy number truly.” Whereupon Will replies, ‘Read it to me that I may know whereof you speak for as you know I cannot ascertain the meaning of these printed blots as I make none of these myself.” When the actor friend reads out Greene’s words, “for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tyger’s Hearte wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the onely Shake scene in a countrie”, Will says, “Verily, but what be his point ?”

No one is to imagine, however, that Marlowe or Kyd would complain of William’s supposed ‘slicing out passages’, ‘altering characters’ and ‘putting in chunks of his own’ with their plays while they looked on unperturbed.

Another author, F.E. Halliday, says about this same publication of Groatsworth in his ‘Shakespeare and his World’, P48, but not with Greene’s actual words: “There was a young actor, no graduate and no gentleman, but a conceited ‘Shakescene’, who had had the audacity to set up as dramatist and write plays that the public preferred to his.”

It is true that this line is the first line of York’s speech in Henry VI Part III, but it is a well known line of Christopher Marlowe exactly as he wrote it in another play and it was lifted intact and placed into this speech when it was written, but when was it written ? Halliday says, P51: “By the end of 1592, then, Shakespeare had written the three parts of Henry VI and made a considerable reputation as a dramatist”

Having read Greene’s own words, it can be readily seen that none of this has any bearing upon what Greene wrote. Greene does not say anything about the person being neither a graduate nor a gentleman. He makes no mention of this person writing plays and the statement that the public preferred his plays to Greene’s is pure fantasy. The extent reviews in Nashe’s ‘Pierce Pennilesse’ and the income of Marlowe’s play at the Rose attest to other playwright’s popularity with the public whereas there are few if any printed accolades to ‘William’s plays’ during these same early years. Halliday continues: “The reference is unmistakably to Shakespeare, for ‘Tyger’s hart wrapt in a Players hyde’ is a parody of a line in Henry VI Part III. The Duke of York is addressing his captor, Queen Margaret: ‘O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’.”

There is no statement of anyone, named either ‘Shake speare’ or ‘Shaxper’, ever found that said anything personal or otherwise. The name is found only on a few Quartos of plays, some not now ascribed to the name. No author or person has written any words describing knowing or seeing anyone named ‘Shakespeare’. There is no reason why any writer should claim that there was such a man.

An actor is now a ‘mere’ actor when William is considered no longer an ‘actor’ and travelling is still ‘unrewarding’ and ‘vagabondage’ has the overtones of base servitude but Burbadge, Alleyne, Phillip, Kempe, and the others were no ‘mere’ actors. Alleyne retired a very wealthy man after only a decade or so as an actor. Granted, he married the boss’s daughter but many of the ‘mere’ actors and not only the leading actors left their friends a sizeable inheritance.

“A mere actor had no alternative to his unrewarding vagabondage, but Shakespeare was now primarily a writer and would be far more profitably employed in practicing his craft.”

says about these critical years of 1591 to 1593, about the plague: “From which for the last ten years London had been virtually free; indeed, there had been no serious outbreak since the year before Shakespeare’s birth. But in the summer of 1592, the dreaded pestilence struck again. The theatres were closed and the companies driven unprofitably into the provinces.” It is known that the companies did make a profit, one less than before but a profit. If they could not, they would not have taken their equipment and men into the villages but they were welcomed there.

“What was Shakespeare doing during these two years ? By this time we should expect him to be a sharer and no longer a hireling, but there is no record of his touring with any of the companies.”Thereis no reason to ‘expect him to be a sharer’ as here is no evidence that he was ever a ‘hireling’ and hirelings did not graduate to be a ‘sharer’ as many biographers claim for William. Not all members of the Lord Chamberlain, his servants, were sharers and they were not hirelings. Halliday is correct in saying that there is no record of William touring with any company during the plague, but there is also no record of William belonging to any acting company before or after the plague.

After all of these complicated ‘ifs’, it will be apparent that Greene did parody the line that he knew to be from Marlowe’s pen as he read or saw Marlowe’s play for it is to Marlowe, his fellow playwright, and to Nashe and to Peele as well, that he addresses his plea and warning, knowing that those men would appreciate the pun on Marlowe’s famous line.

Halliday’s account would sound most logical, if the reader had never read Greene’s original text, but to those who have read it, the quoting of the word ‘Shakescene’ without the hyphen must seem as fraudulent to make a single word of it so as to appear a family name. The same reader may be slightly dismayed also at Halliday’s paraphrasing Greene’s words into “a young actor, no gentleman but a conceited Shakescene’, knowing that Greene did not say that the person was conceited or vain but ‘in his own conceit’, or in his own imagination or fancy. The Sonnets are said to be full of ‘conceits’, or elaborate or extended metaphors, but then Greene was a ‘scholar’.F.E.Halliday

Some scholars say that although they place these plays in 1591, much of it is considered to have been written in 1592, but when was the first performance of Part III for Greene to have seen it and to remembered that one line, then stagger to the home to the woman who bore his ‘baseborn’ son, Fortunatus, and while dying there in sickness and poverty, to dash off this account of how he sank so low to be a destitute pamphleteer from the ‘Arch plaimaking poet’ that he once was not forgetting to ‘unmistakably’ identify the culprit who writes plays that the public prefers to his by spelling half his name but with a capital ‘S’ (as all nouns were capitalized at that time) and then, choosing that remembered line from the play, make a parody of it so that everyone down through the ages would positively know of whom he spoke, knowing that this play would never be lost but Thomas Kyd’s ‘Hamlet’ would be lost., and to beg his friend, Chettle, to publish this after he dies in September.

These must, indeed, have been busy years for the ‘young poet’. He was long past his 28th birthday when the plague broke out in 1592. Marlowe had written his first play at Cambridge and had entered London with a degree before he was 23. Back on Henley Street, the house, occupied only by William and his wife Anne and three children, his mother and father, and three brothers and his sister, must have been the source of “his new found happiness”.

“In Stratford he had a wife and three young children of whom he could have seen little for the last five years, and we may, I think, be pretty sure that it was with them that he spent the greater part of the period of the plague.”

rendezvous is still two years away. What does William do in the meantime ?

“The Queen’s [acting company] made for Stratford soon after it [the plague] began, and possibly he accompanied and left them there, arranging to rejoin them when the theatres opened.”There is a record, somewhere, which states that the Queen’s acting company went to Stratford in 1592, as Halliday says, but from this morsel of information a more intricate tapestry is woven of the picture that gradually emerges. There is no evidence that William was a member of the Queen’s company as this is an invention of 20th century biographers to give a plausible answer to what William was doing in these early years. However, supposing without foundation that William was a member at this time, he now hitches a ride with the company to Stratford, does not act upon the country stages with them, and so earns no money from their appearances as they proceed on their way without him, but he arranges for them to come by so that he may ride back with them unknown years from then when the theatres reopen. The theatre company of players are to oblige him by picking him up in two years time when he cannot be bothered to be so ‘unprofitably’ occupied with supporting them in their endeavours while the plague rages in London.That

“These were busy years for the young dramatist. He had already written Richard III, so rounding off the Henry VI trilogy, and now in his new found happiness he turned naturally to comedy and lyric poetry. The Comedy of Errors, the Taming of the Shrew, and the Two Gentlemen of Verona belong to this idyllic period, as do the early sonnets and the two long poems, Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece”, says biographer F.E. Halliday.

This reference to Stratford ensures that F. E. Halliday, too, considers the ‘great poet’ to be the Stratford William and that this William, of whom much is now known, would be in London five years earlier than 1592 that would have him leaving his Henley Street house in 1587 which is the time that Marlowe came to London. If William spent the greater part of the plague years in Stratford, this is where he would be “writing the five or six plays, batch of sonnets, and at least ‘Venus and Adonis’”. If so, William could have seen little of Anne and the children for another two years and they would not be the only ones not seeing the busy writer amid the piles of parchment papers filling the little room if they could manage to push the door open as there were his parents, John and Mary, and his three brothers, too, in that little house on Henley Street next to the ‘east wing’ that was John’s glove and wool shop where he skinned sheep, calves and dogs for his curing of hides to make his gloves and bags. Yes, John Shaksper ‘no doubt’ made the first doggie bags while William was out back contemplating on the line, ‘O tyger’s harte wrappt in a woman’s hyde’? William without any doubt could well have spent all of his time at Stratford during the years 1587 to 1593 and since that is what he did, it is all the more reason to say that he was not writing plays on Henley Street.

6 Greene had already explained that a writer was not ‘more profitably employed in practising his craft’ that an actor was who was paid for each performance.

Duke of Gloster, was a character in ‘Henry VI Part III’ but ‘Richard III’ was written in 1594 long after the plague years. ‘Comedy of Errors’ and ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona’ were written in 1591, long before the plague. ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, 1593, is the only play listed as having been written from the summer of 1592 to the spring of 1594 with the possible exception of ‘Loues Labore Lost’ that may not have been completed before the spring of 1594 and for how much did playwrights sell their plays ? Halliday says P57: “There was nobody to protect the luckless author or the company of actors to whom he had sold a play, normally for L5 or L6 from an unscrupulous publisher.”

This is during the plague years that “at the height of its fury claiming a thousand victims in a single week” back in London, while Father John at the time was “not cominge monethlie to the churche, it is sayd for feare of process for debtte”, so that could not have been his source of “new found Whateverhappiness”.thereason for this ’idyllic period’ for ‘naturally’ turning to comedy, Richard III could not have been part of it. He had not ‘already written’ it, ‘creating incidentally his first great character’.Richard,

Some biographers claim that play scripts were well guarded so that other companies could not use them. The appearances of the Quartos of the Plays were explained by devious methods of dictating the words from memory to someone outside the theatre and other impractical excuses. No ‘publisher’ is known to have stolen a play as the publisher usually had his name on the printed Quarto and all printers have the permission of the publisher, the one who takes the script papers to the printer. Several sources support the price of selling a play for about L6. Greene had said that actors earned infinitely more that playwrights. Yet, the biographers continually claim that William made his fortune from writing plays and from the 101 other tasks performed when asked. Insisting that William of Stratford was the ‘great poet’ places a strain upon credulity when the Shaksper family were continually in debt during these years, the one verifiable statement by the Stratford official records. The most reliable evidence that ‘William of Stratford’ did not make his professional money from writing is William’s will that still recorded the sources of his wealth, investments in land holdings and in rents. William never sold any property once gained. In the years 1591 and 1592, several changes in the companies occurred. At the end of 1589, public plays were forbidden in the City of London. The Lord Mayor wrote to the Lord Burlegh on the sixth of November stating that he had brought the members of Lord Admiral’s and Lord Stranges’s companies “to whom I speciallie gaue in Charge and required them in her Majesties name to forebere playing until further order mighte be geuen to theire allowance in that respect: Whereupon the L. Admiralles players very dutifullie obeyed, but the others in the very Contemptuous manner departing from me, went to the Crosse Keys and play’d that afternoon.”

These two companies merged in 1591, their productions at the Rose are recorded by Phillip Henslowe. The merged company appeared at Whitehall Court “for six severall plays” on the 27th and 28th of December, 1591 and the 1st and 9th of January and the 8th of February, 1592. A second group, still called the Admiral’s Men, toured the provinces and the Admiral Strange unit also toured appearing at Canterbury, Marlowe’s home town, in July, 1592 when the plague was beginning in London. During the plague in 1593, Edward Alleyn returned to the patronage of the Lord Admiral, described as “Edward Allen, servaunt to the right honourable the Lord High Admiral” in the Privy Council Warrant which also lists “William Kemp, Thomas Pope, John Heminges, Augustine Phillipes and Georg Brian, al one companie, servaunts to our verie good Lord the Lord Strainge” not the Lord Chamberlain !

Also in the plague year of 1592, the merged company of Lord Strange and the Lord Admiral presented in their first year at the Rose, Marlowe’s ‘The Jew of Malta’ and ‘Harey vj’ In May of 1592, both Tamburlaine plays were included in the repertoire. Also featured was ‘Jeronymo’ by Thomas Kyd who was the father of the ‘revenge play’, the greatest of all revenge plays being ‘Hamlet’. Kyd wrote a play which is now completely ‘lost’. It was called ‘Hamlet’. Marlowe wrote a play for the Pembroke’s Players, ‘Edward II’, which contains this speech from Mortimer. “Farewell, fair queen; weep not for Mortimer That scorns the world, and as a traveller Goes to discover countries yet unknown” which compares to “But that the dread of something after death the undiscover’d country from whose bourn No traveller returns”, or to “How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted o’er In states unborn and accents yet unknown”.

Although they were not seen as having very much in common except their occupation, Kyd and Marlowe shared a room after the merger of the companies and so their papers and writings were in the same room for a time during 1590 91. It is fully documented that Marlowe was entirely occupied with writing plays during the years 1592 and 1593 and it is documented that the player’s companies were active throughout the period of the plague, either in the provinces or near London. What was either ‘William’ doing during these plague years ? In the 20th century he is credited by his many biographers in writing no less than six plays, some list eight plays, the three ‘Henry VI’ plays, ‘Richard III’ ‘Titus Andronicus’, ‘Comedy of Errors’ with ‘The Taming of the Shrew’; and ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ as well as ‘Venus and Adonis (1593) and many of the ‘Sonnets’. “What a pile of work to have accomplished !”, exclaimed one of the 20th century commentators, A.L. Rowse.

‘Dido, Queen of Carthage’ was written by Marlowe and Thomas Nashe while students at Cambridge. It was ’played by’ the Children of her Majesty’s Chapel and was published in 1594. It was mainly a translation from Virgil’s Aeneid and was another of Marlowe’s translations as those from Ovid and Lucan. The action of Act II Scene i appears in the First Players scene in ‘Hamlet’ and is mentioned in ‘The Tempest’. Also in 1592, in the combined Admiral Strange company produced the ‘Tragedy of the Guyse’ of Marlowe, his ‘Harey vj’ and a play called ‘Titus’ which could be ‘Titus Andronicus’ that has been assigned to Thomas Kyd or perhaps with Peele. As this was very much their type of dramatic structure, it was also billed ‘Titus and Ondronicus’, the name of the play that was staged at the Rose at the beginning of 1594 by the Earl of Sussex Men who also staged the ‘The Jew of Malta’, both plays being produced a year after Marlowe’s ‘disappearance’.

Marlowe and the others, Peele, Nashe, Greene and Kyd began writing in their ‘teens’ at school, or in their early ‘twenties’ at a university or professionally. Greene wrote everything, he was considered a top rated journalist, everything was grist for his mill. Bacon wrote volumes on many subjects. Ralegh wrote on science and history, Spenser with book length poems, Thomas Watson and William Byrd with madrigals, all writers differing and all prolific.

To write eight plays in two years would have been staggering for an accomplished writer midway or beyond in his career but to sit down a the outset with no writing experience and, if considering William of Stratford as the dramatist, possibly not able to read, as his daughter, Judith, was unable to read, and which Master Poet would not teach his daughter to read ?

It is true that great geniuses in the Arts have been extremely prolific, Leonardo de Vinci poured out works in several disciplines and wrote about his interests in Science but De Vinci lived to the age of 67 and his work spanned many years. Kopernik was 70, Monteverde 76, Galileo 78, Goethe 83. Stradivarius was forming violins when he was past 90. All of the great artists kept on producing as they loved what they did and they did not begin to think about what their craft would be when they were 27 and they did not give up creating when they were 44.

There is a great difference that is overlooked in those persons who are independent from the clock who paint, write, compose whenever they wish or when inspiration strikes or even when a deadline is near. They can work far into the night or arise very early. The actor belongs to the clock. Plays in the Elizabethan age were produced in the afternoon in outdoor theatres, taking place about three o’clock. Repertory theatre played a different play each day, with rehearsals in the morning, for the morrow’s play with the actors always controlled by the clock. Marlowe frequently attended Walter Ralegh’s ‘School of Night’ as outsiders called it, discussing new ideas and concepts, the esoteric, the adventurous, with other authors and with great camaraderie with Spencer, Chapman, Heriot, all men interested in all things. ‘Shakespeare’ had none of it. ‘He’ did not associate with any of these minds. There is no mention in any records of a ‘Wllm Shakespere’ during these years, only as a name on a rare front page in a printedTheQuartobiographers continue to convince readers of the impossible, to claim that their ‘Shake speare’ author was in London in 1587 or earlier when the name was never known in London until the name appeared in the Registry in the fall of 1593 while they further make the claim that the Author was a man named Wllm Shaxper who was born, raised and married and had a child while continuing to live in a house on Henley Street in the little town of Stratford, all before 1587, while no one had ever heard of or mentioned the Stratford man until after 1660 when Sir William Davenant claimed to have known him when a child.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ‘GROATSWORTH’ Robert J. Meyer

The paragraph written by Robert Greene in his ‘A Groatsworth of Wit’ has been in the last century one of the most important pillars upon which the Biographers’ have built William’s early ‘reputation’ and the ‘authentication’ of his being a playwright by a ‘contemporary’ who is ‘one of the most notorious and distinguished men of his time’. Later biographers claim it to be the earliest mention of ‘Shake speare’s name in a written or printed document or page. It supposedly establishes many ‘facts’ about him, that he was an actor and a playwright before September 3, 1592, when Greene died. These lines indicate none of this but in the ‘Life of William Shakespeare’ published in ‘The Complete Shakespeare’ by Books Inc. in 1939, the biographer of that ‘Life’, says, directly after quoting Greene’s paragraph in its entirety: “The chief and obvious purpose of this address is to induce Marlowe, Lodge, and Peele to cease to write for the stage; and, in the course of his exhortation, Greene bitterly inveighs against an ‘upstart crow’ who had availed himself of the dramatic labours of others, who, in his own opinion was, ‘the only SHAKE SCENE in a country’. All this is clearly levelled at a Shakespeare, under the purposely perverted name of Shake scene (ital), and the words ‘Tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a player’s hide’, are a parody upon a line in an historical play (most likely Greene) ‘O, tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide’, from which Shakespeare had taken his Henry VI, part iii.”

“Áll this is clearly levelled at Shakespeare, under the purposely perverted name of Shake scene.” Why does he say ‘purposely perverted ? The biographers all must presume that all the playwrights whom Greene is addressing knew by name this one ‘upstart Crow’ of all ‘the Puppits’ that were on all of the stages in London at that time, and that Greene knew that they knew this one actor by name so that it was not necessary for him to spell out the name and he could ‘purposely pervert’ it into ‘Shake scene’ and that his friends would know instantly to whom he was referring, but they do not know anything about him and that is why Greene is informing them with ‘Yes, trust them not, for there is an upstart Crow . . ‘.

At least this biographer can see that the actor only fancies himself to be more than he really is, by saying “who imagined himself’” and “who in his own opinion” “Later biographers say that Greene says that the actor is a writer and that he is the only ‘shake scene’ although this biographer does say ‘writer’ where no writer is implied by Greene’.

When printing out the entire original passage of Greene’s paragraph, this biographer italicizes the phrases ‘Johannes Fac totum’ and ‘Tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a payer’s hide’. To italicize in one’s own comments on a quote is permissible but not in printing out a long critical passage in order to show exactly what the original material is expressed. The reader should be aware of who is italicizing or capitalizing and of whether capitalization is the literary custom or for emphases. This biographer italicizes Greene’s words while finding that “it is necessary to quote the whole passage”, if both italicized phrases are important to his premise, he should do this later in his comments and not in presenting ‘the whole passage which he feels “necessary to quote”. The reader should find it necessary to know how Greene presented it. This biographer transposes the original spelling to modern spelling. Why is this necessary ? He drops all of the capitals from the nouns except the noun, ‘Shake scene’, making it stand out suggesting that it is a proper name. He makes one other exception as he leaves in all the capitals in the two phrases that he italicizes, except the word ‘player’s’ which makes it appear that this is Greene’s purpose, to accentuate these capitalized words over all the other words whereas it is the biographer’s purpose for he will later make use of the phrase ‘Johannes Fac totum’, although it is unclear why he would leave ‘Tiger’s’ capitalized and not ‘player’s’.

Out of his Latin phrase, ‘fac totum’, quickly evolves the legend that William had these many facilities listed here. It is obvious now wh y the biographer italicizes and capitalizes ‘Fac totum’ as Greene does not ! ’Johannes’ is the noun, not ‘fac totum’. This biographer, in quoting the whole passage misleads by capitalizing and hyphenating where Greene does not, and that is villainous and shows a most pitiful ambition in the one that does it, which is a parody upon a line in an historical play, most likely, ‘no doubt’, by Thomas Kyd. ‘The Lord Chamberlain, his servants’ did not come into existence until the Spring of 1594. Greene was dead by then, so he could not be ‘thrown into the shade’ by anyone in their company or out of it. Again, the inference is that William was almost the exclusive dramatist for one company. A half dozen plays would not keep a company going two weeks. A different play was presented each afternoon. There is no inference in Greene’s remarks for any of these conclusions. It is all fabricated by looking back from the 20th century. Step back into the London of 1592, and all of these statements would be incomprehensible to Greene or to the local ironmonger.Playwrights were not ‘rivals’. They knew one another personally and respected each other’s work. In later years at least, if not then, dramatists collaborated with each other, as many as four would combine their efforts to write a play. They knew that no one playwright or even four could supply a single company, much less three or four companies, but none of these realities seems to deter the biographers in raising William’s pedestal. Fletcher and Beaumont were prolific playwrights singly and as a team, but even they would not or could not attempt the furious array of writing chores attributed here and elsewhere to William. “And all hand written with a quill pen and with nary a blot upon the page, you say ?”

This paragraph and his following paragraph are so familiar in inferences, tone and purpose and the conclusions contained about William’s activities, talents and notoriety, to those of later biographers that it seems that these paragraphs have been the common source for all later commentators’ opinions on Greene’s statements. This writer believes that the ‘Tiger’s heart’ line is from an historical play “(most likely by Greene)” whereas later writers know that the line is by Marlowe.“Hence, it is evident that Shakespeare, near the end of 1592, had established such a reputation, and was so important a rival of the dramatists; who, until he came forward, had kept undisputed possession of the stage, as to excite the envy and enmity of Greene, even during his last and fatal illness. It is also, we think, establishes another point not hitherto averted to, viz., that our great poet possessed such variety of talent, that, for the purposes of the company of which he was a member, he could do anything that he might be called upon to perform: he was the Johannes Fac totum [ital] of the association; he was an actor, and he was a writer of original plays, and adapter, and improver of those already in existence, (some of theme by Greene, Marlowe, Lodge, or Peele,) and no doubt he contributed prologues, or epilogues, and inserted scenes, speeches, or passages, on any temporary emergency. Having his ready assistance, the Lord Chamberlain’s servants required few other contributions from rival dramatists: Shakespeare was the Johannes Fac totum [ital] who, in all probability, had thrown men like Greene, Lodge and Peele, and even Marlowe himself, into the shade.”

How would Greene know this actor’s name ? None of these biographies has given reason how anyone in 1592 would know the names of the ‘actor’. No biographer has even mentioned whether playbills were handed out to the one or two thousand playgoers at each performance with a different play being performed each afternoon at each theatre or Inn yard.

Since this entire passage has been quoted, only the parentheses by this biographer are noted.“With neither of them, that take offence, was I acquainted; and with one of them (Marlowe) I care not if I never be; the other (Shakespeare), whom at that time I did not so much spare, as since I wish I had.” “For the first (Marlowe), whose learning I reverence”.

play diary lists the plays in February and March of 1591 as having three performances at the Rose of the play “Harry the vj’. This was a play written by Marlowe. Halliday calls it the first record of a performance of a ‘Shakespeare play’. Yet, a year and four months later, William, supposedly, is turning out so many plays that the company needs ‘few other contributions from rival dramatists’

Not one of the later biographers when echoing these honours heaped upon Caesar deviate far from the opinions expressed in this biographer’s paragraphs, as totally unfounded upon Greene’s words as they are, and this man is now become a God and we petty men must peep about under his huge legs, which is another line in an historical play but this is not a parody. They present ‘proof’ that it was William of whom Greene spoke based upon the information related by this biographer in this his third paragraph.

Greene does not mention William as acknowledged by the writer. Greene does not mention Marlowe either but the passage relating to remarks supposedly about Marlowe is not quoted here. The biographer then introduces the actual words of Chettle ‘designating him, William, so intelligently’. The names inside the parenthesis are placed there by this biographer who says:“His apology to Shakespeare is contained in a tract called ‘Kind Heart’s Dream’, which came prior to the end of 1592. The whole passage relating to Marlowe and Shakespeare is highly interesting and it therefore extracted here in its entirety.”

The biographer says that this established reputation is, hence, evident near the end of 1592. Greene died on September 3, 1592 and he had written this in the months before, so this ‘Crow’, then, was on the stage during the spring or summer at the latest. This is the same Jack-of-alltrades, seemingly so essential for contributions, insertions, adaptations, improvements on any temporary emergency that in the fall of that year ‘possibly’ accompanies the Queen’s Players to Stratford where he left them to spend the next two plague years in ‘enforced leisure’ which ‘bore fruit in two long narrative poems’ in a small crowded household of ten impoverished souls on HenleyPhilipStreet.Henslowe’s

This biographer believes that the ‘first’ is Marlowe with whom Chettle does not care to be acquainted yet ‘whose learning’ Chettle ‘reverences’. The ‘other’ mentioned by Chettle is believed by this biographer to be William, ‘no doubt’ because Chettle praises him highly and wishes that he had been acquainted with him. It is obvious that the ‘other’, not being Marlowe, is either Nashe or Peele and not Lodge as his biographer mistakes.

“It was natural and proper that Shakespeare should take offence at this gross and public attack: and that he did, we are told by Chettle himself, the avowed editor of the ‘Groatsworth of Wit’: he does not indeed mention Shakespeare, but he designates him so intelligently that there is no room for dispute. Marlowe, also, and not without reason, complained of the manner in which Greene had spoken of him in the same work, but to him Chettle made no apology, while to Shakespeare he offered all the amends in his power.”

Later biographers have added another ‘contemporary voice’, that of Southampton, who they say, was one of the ‘divers of worship’ who ‘reported ‘his ‘uprightness of dealing’. They claim this on the word from line four of the 112th Sonnet: “For what care I who calls me well or ill So you o’ergreen my bad, my good allow ?”

Among all the sonnet lines of the Sonnets, this one line was, with heavily congested nasal passages, sniffed out by a later biographer who sees in this one word, ‘o’ergreen’, probable proof that Wriothesley came to William’s rescue in 1592, and assured Chettle of William’s probity. If Wriothesley, who was only 18 in 1592, knew William that well, he would have had to know him at so young an age that he would be away from London at school, and why would William have waited another two years to dedicate his ‘two long narrative poems’ to him and why would he try to cultivate a friendship that was already several years in blossom by going to the trouble of publishing the poems to entreat him to be his patron ? Previous scholars did not see ‘o’ergreen’ as anything other than meaning that is obvious. “For what care I who calls me well or ill so (long as) you o’ergreen (or ‘cover’) my bad and allow my good ?” In ‘The Yale Shakespeare Series’ 1923, the footnote, P56, interprets this ‘o’ergreen’ as ‘cover as by a vine or grass’.

consider Greene’s ‘Groatsworth’ to be the cornerstone that attests to William’s reputation in 1592 is apparent in Peter Quennell’s ‘Shakespeare’, 1963. As soon as line 9 in his Preface, he says: “From the year 1592, when he was attacked by an unhappy fellow poet, we find constant references to his increasing reputation as a writer”, and as soon as line 10 in Chapter Two, called ‘London Apprenticeship’, he says, “All that we know of Shakespeare’s professional beginnings is that by 1592 he had acquired sufficient fame to arouse the antagonism of an unhappy fellow author; and that probably about the same period he joined the company known as ‘Strange’s Men’.”

Quennell refers to Greene only as ‘unhappy fellow poet’ and ‘unhappy fellow author’ that diminishes this ‘fellow’ in the imagination of those who do not know to whom Quennell is referring. Quennell also follows the earlier biographer in selecting certain capitals to remain in quoting Greene’s paragraph containing, ‘Tygers heart wrapped in a player’s hide’ and ‘Johannes fac totum’. ‘Shake scene’ is capitalized along with ‘Tiger’s’ and ‘Johannes’, only those and the spelling is modernized. Author A. L. Rowse does almost the same in his 1963 biography. There are no italics in his version of the quotation but ‘Johannes’ and ‘Factotum’, now one word, and ‘Tiger’s’ are capitalized, as is the necessary ‘Shake-scene’. Why they all capitalize ‘Tiger’s’ is a puzzle for when one writer puts it in quotation and the other does not, it still appears as if in the original text, ‘Tyger’s’ is the beginning of a sentence and it is the beginning in neither Greene’s paragraph nor in the line from Marlowe’s ‘Harry vj’ nor from ‘Henry VI’ accredited to William.

“Thus the amends made to Shakespeare for the envious assault of Greene, show most decisively the high opinion entertained of him, towards the close of 1592, as an actor, an author, and a Mostman.”biographers

That there is nothing in Greene’s ‘Groatsworth’ to indicate that the ‘upstart Crow’ was William, and that there is no indication in Chettle’s ‘Apology’ that the two complainants were other than two of the playwrights to whom Greene was directing his warning of actors, and nothing to suggest that the ‘two’ were other than friends whom Greene knew well enough to recognize their ‘past excellence’ and their ‘admired inventions’, has meant nothing to any of the later biographers nor has it deterred them from making invention of their own out of whole cloth weaving diaphanous threads in their transparent designs of the invented William.

From Greene’s clear and vivid passage, the biographers have laid the cornerstone conclusion: “the high opinion entertained of him, towards the close of 1592, as an actor, an author, and a man”.

From justly removing this ‘Groatsworth’ underpinning out from under this high monumental pedestal, and then by removing yet another and another of these feeble 1592 supports, the clay feet do not tumble to the ground but remain unsupported in the air. In the starry eyes of his beholders, ‘the young gentleman’ of 1592, according to Fates and Destinies, and such odd sayings, the Sisters Three, and such branches of learning, is indeed, as you would say in plain terms, gone well past canonization, far beyond veneration, he has been beatified.

Walter Ralegh with all his colourful exploits, talents and accomplishments, created an historical figure that attracted the imagination of writers for many later years. As gifted as he was, he lived in an age that was alive with equally colourful poets, soldiers and explorers and he had to be exceptional even to be noticed by influential men of his time and to catch the fancy of the Queen.Hemost probably was introduced to the Royal Court in a logical series of incidents involving influential relatives and friends, but this would not be romantic enough for the writings of the Legend of Sir Walter Ralegh. In 1662, just after the Restoration and during the re birth of English Theatre and at a time when writers turned their attention back to the Elizabethan and Jacobean age that had been separated from them by the Civil War, a book was published that illuminated great figures of that time. It was called the “History of the Worthies of England’ written by the Rev Thomas Fuller who relates therein how Walter caught the eye of the Queen.

“This Captain Raleigh coming out of Ireland to the English Court in good habit (his clothes then being a considerable part of his estate) found the Queen walking, till, meeting with a plashy place, she seemed to scruple going thereon. Presently Raleigh cast and spread his new plush cloak on the ground; whereon the Queen trod gently rewarding him afterwards with many suits, for his so free and seasonable tend of so fair a foot cloth.”

“From twisted recollections of events more than thirty years past, from hearsay and gossip, from inferences as to what must have been, and from speculation as to what might have been, [Herndon] wove the fabric of the Ann Rutledge story, which he spread before the Springfield people in a long lecture in 1866. In lush periods of purple phrases, he told his fellow citizens that Ann was the only woman Lincoln had ever loved, that as late as 1860 he had still cherished his affection for her alone.”

In his great volumes on Lincoln, historian and poet Carl Sandburg included Herndon’s hoary tale, but he later admitted that it had no historical validity. Herndon was a heavy drinker and was thus not liked by Mrs Lincoln, and so he may have been moved for both reasons to create a more idealistic relationship for Lincoln. A number of aphorisms appeared in the Congressional Record attributed to Lincoln but such quotes as ‘You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift’ were actually the inventions of the Rev William J. H. Boetcher who wrote them in 1916.

This romance was invented by the same Thomas Fuller who included in the same Book of Worthies in 1662, a skimpy and enigmatic note on ‘William’ stating that he was born in Stratford, that he was buried at Stratford, that in him was compounded three eminent poets, Martial, Ovid and Plautus, and that he had a battle of wits with Ben Jonson, the two he likened to a ‘Spanish great Galleon and an English man of war’, but although he does not identify who is the galleon and who the man of war, he does include his scholarly reference to the Spanish Armada just as he relied on a scholarly reference to the expensive fashions that Ralegh was known to wear. Thus is born the highly remembered and oft repeated romance of Walter throwing his coat, doublet, wrap or shawl on the puddle, mud hole, garbage or gutter. To this day, at the mention of Walter Ralegh, the old yarn of the cloak appears.

SIR WALTER RALEGH Robert J. Meyer

The popular practice of conjuring romantic anecdotes to fill the obscure gaps in the biographies of the famous continued into the 19th century when Abraham Lincoln’s law partner and biographer, William Herndon, related the fond relationship of Lincoln with Ann Rutledge. Ever since, at the mention of Lincoln’s early life, the ghost of Ann Rutledge appears. Yet, in his essay collection, ‘Lincoln Reconsidered”, Professor David Donald wrote:

However, William’s twins were born to Anne in 1585, and he cannot have been ‘hounded out of town’ any earlier so this places his ‘setting off to London’ at the earliest when he was 21, and so the callow youth incident seems to have been invented in vain.

Walter Ralegh came to the attention of the Queen through a logical long chain of events that began with his half brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert whose long dreamed ambition prompted the writing of his book, ‘Discourse to prove a passage by the North west, to Calaia, and the East Indies”, published in 1576 by his friend and fellow soldier, George Gascoigne. Gascoigne had already noticed the poetic talent of Ralegh and he included some of his verses into the first edition of his ‘The Steele Glas’, published the same year. Gascoigne was also a poet and literary figure and, his friend, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, probably was the one who introduced Ralegh to Leicester, who, in turn, would have sponsored him at Court with introductions to both Lord Burlegh and Sir Francis Walsingham who later gave Marlowe the freedom of his house situated south of Greenwich. Ralegh is known to have written to the Earl of Leicester on August 25, 1581, to complain: “Your Honor, havinge no use of such poore followers, hathe utterly forgotten mee. Notwithstanding, if your Lordshipe shall please to think mee your’s, as I am, I wilbe found as redy, and dare do as miche in your service, as any you may cummande”. Compare this letter with the Dedication found in ‘Venus and Adonis’ twelve years later. Note: The original spellings of the names, Ralegh; and Burlegh, gave the sound of their names as Raw leh and Bur leh. The later spelling of ‘-liegh’ implies the sound either of ‘Raw-lay’ and “Bur-lay or of ‘Bur-lee’ and ‘Raw lee’, both being incorrect.

At the mention of the early life of William of Stratford, the deer stealing legend appears even in a 1970 fold out publication of Shakespeare and his contemporary history that refers to the “story of Shakespeare poaching deer and rabbits from the land of Sir Thomas Lucy who has him imprisoned, and then driven from Stratford. He leaves Anne (who had money of her own) and his children in the care of his parents and sets out for London”. If William were ‘driven from Stratford’ by such an incident, it would have been at the earliest in 1585 when he was 21 and a father of three children, hardly an impetuous youth led astray by local hot bloods into an act of deer stealing as is usually inferred. If he had ever been arrested or imprisoned, the offence would still be on record as the documents in Warwickshire are quite detailed even for minor offences in those years. Several ‘Shacksperes’ are listed there but not ‘William’ ! Whatever money Anne had ‘of her own’ upon her marriage in 1582 would not have amounted to much in 1585 as she was then a part of the large Henley Street family that had been heavily in debt for ten years, and to say that William ever left Anne and the children ‘in the care of his parents’ is to ignore that in 1585 Anne was almost thirty However, these oft told tales were invented to fill the gap left in recorded history and to solve the mystery of what caused ‘Shake speare” to ‘set out for London’. The intent is to have him in London as early as possible, which means two years before Marlowe arrived and so a story is concocted about ‘young’ William of Stratford falling in with unidentified unsavoury companions to be ‘led astray’ from the true path in his impressionable ‘youth’, however totally against his upbringing by his head of Town Council father John. John Aubrey, the inventive biographer, has him coming “to London, I guess, about 18”, the age when he married, thereby omitting his three children. The story includes the mandatory moral comeuppance of his being brought before Sir Thomas Lucy, his arrest and imprisonment but this is not sufficient. He must perforce be ‘hounded out of town’ to get him to London in time to write the dramatic chronicles of Henry VI and Richard III because those in a later century looking back know that these plays were written about 1591-2, but the original versions of those plays, ‘The Contention ‘and ‘The True Tragedy’ were written years earlier and they would like William to have written those too.

A search for these words in the later King James Version will not be fulfilled as they may have found revision and they are not there. Would that some English Artaxerxes had commanded a search as to whether things said by William’s early memorialists be true or not be true. A further search of these fabled chronicles will determine whether these things were so.

Lord Grey’s secretary, poet Edmund Spenser, wrote his dispatches of the massacre, not an exceptional event for that time or for any time since. For the slaughter of 600 men, neither Ralegh nor Lord Grey was censured by the Queen, the act was far less to be considered than quarrelling on the tennis court.

Ralegh’s letter came after five full years of military service in France, 1569 74, followed by a time as an Esquire in the Body Extraordinary, an elaborate term for the pool of unpaid young men at the outer fringe of the Court where they were available to be sent on errands, their chance to be noticed for advancement to higher offices, but also where they could languish for years. Although Ralegh would have stood out in any crowd as a six foot tall handsome man in his mid twenties, ‘a good presence’, ‘a strong natural wit’, he seems to have made no impression on the Inner Court in the four years of 1574 78.

Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Ralegh’s half brother, continued to pursue his dream of finding the North West Passage, and on the 11th of June, 1578, the Queen gave Gilbert his letters patent granting him “free libertie and licence from time to time and at all times for ever hereafter, to discover, finde, search out, and view such remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countreys and territories not actually possessed by an Christian prince of people”.

In 1580, Ralegh came to the attention of the Court at last, but it was the Court of the Privy Council that sent him and Sir Thomas Perrot to Fleet prison for ‘a fraye made betwixt them’. One month later, Ralegh was brought before the Privy Council again, this time for an altercation on the tennis court with Mr Wingfield whom he accompanied into the Marshalsea prison. Ralegh was always quick to defend his honour against insults.

Ralegh and his brother, Carew, joined Gilbert in November of 1578 on his expedition with eleven ships that sailed for Cadiz with the intention of continuing to the West Indies but when met with a variety of mishaps, their vessels returned by February of 1579, all but one, ‘The Falcon’, captained by Walter Ralegh who being desirous to do somewhat worthy of honour, took his course for the West Indies, but when he sailed as far as the islands of Cape Verde upon the coast of Africa, he was enforced to set sail and return to England. In this voyage he had many dangerous adventures as battles on the sea and surviving tempests; but he arrived at Plymouth in the west country in May. Gilbert and his younger brother, Ralegh, were then ordered “to desist from any such enterprise upon pain of her Majesties indignation”. The Queen would have wanted to know more about the one captain of the eleven who did not turn back but continued at sea for the entire winter.

The following July, he commanded 100 men under Lord Grey against the Irish rebellion where in October, the garrison of 600 men “and the fort appointed to be surrendered, capteine Ralegh together with capteine Macworth, who had the ward of the daie, entered into the castell, & made a great slaughter, manie or most part of them being put to the sword”.

This account was penned by John Hooker whose history of the times was published in 1587 “and dedicated to the honourable Sir Walter Ralegh knight, lord warden of the stannarie in the counties of Deuon and Cornwall”. These words are followed on the title page by two excerpts from another book, Esdras 4, “King Artaxerxes commanded the chronicles be searched whether it were true that had biene informed” and Acts 17, “They dailie searched the scriptures whether the things taught were true or not”.

Ralegh had caught the Queen’s fancy as Walter had thrown down the cloak of monetary thrift over the cesspool of Irish unrest for the Queen to place her dainty foot down firmly without furtherTheconcern.Queen’s reaction to the ‘spread cloak’ was swift and highly rewarding for Ralegh with two manor houses and the ‘Farm of Wines’ patent, a monopoly worth 1000 pounds a year from 1583, a lease to Durham House off the Strand on the Thames north bank, and a licence for the exporting of wool cloth netting yearly over 3000 pounds from 1584. He was now able to gain the Queen’s support for his brother Humphrey’s expedition to the northwest. He supplied him with Bark Ralegh, a 200 ton ship of his own design worth 2000 pounds and he bought shares in their company to establish a colony. Sir Humphrey Gilbert was the first Englishman to claim land in the New World for his monarch when he took possession of Newfoundland in 1582-3, but Gilbert on his return journey drowned.

The Queen knighted Ralegh in January of 1585 shortly after he was elected to parliament along with other new members, Francis Bacon, Sir Francis Drake and Robert Cecil, the son of Lord Burlegh. Ralegh would remain a member of every parliament except in the Armada year until the death of Elizabeth. His foremost endeavour was the organizing and financing of exploration and colonization of the New World, sending Sir Thomas Grenville and Sir Francis Drake on expeditions to Puerto Rico, Florida, Bermuda and Virginia. They were accompanied by Ralegh’s friends, artist and mapmaker, John White, and mathematician and scientist, Thomas Hariot, who was also a verse maker. Walter Ralegh had personal contact with major and minor poets from the beginning of his career. He supported and encouraged Edmund Spenser whom he knew as Lord Grey’s secretary in the Irish campaign, and he wrote commendatory verses for the first three books of Spenser’s ‘The Faerie Queene’, “All suddenly I saw the Faery Queene: at whose approach the soule of Petrarke wept”. Elizabeth gave Ralegh permission to call the new land ‘Virginia’ to honour herself as the ‘Virgin Queene’ and to allay that she was born a male. Ralegh’s first verses were published by George Gascoigne, himself a poet. Ralegh had accompanied Sir Philip Sidney, the poet, and the Earl of Leicester in escorting the Queen’s rejected six year suitor, the Duc d’Alencon back to the continent. He attended Sidney’s funeral and later wrote an elegy to Sidney that was mentioned by Sir John Harrington in 1591, “That day their Haniball died, our Scipio fell, Scipio, Cicero, and Petrarch of our time.” ‘Haniball’ refers to Count Hannibal Gonzago who died with Sidney at the Battle of Zutphen . ‘Hamlet’ asks the Players if they can play ‘The Murder of Gonzago’ in Act II, Scene I, which is an excerpt from a work that Marlowe wrote.

In 1581, correspondence between Ralegh and Sir Francis Walsingham, her majesties head of secret service, suggests that Ralegh was somewhat in his service in Ireland. When Ralegh returned to London in December with Lord Grey’s dispatches and was questioned privately on the campaign in Ireland, he proposed an immediate, humane and inexpensive solution to what he called ‘not a Commonwealth but a common woe’ in Ireland. His economical solution was simply to let Ireland be the responsibility of the Irish chieftans who hated the rebel Earl of Desmond, the source of all of the trouble, more than the English detested him. The Queen, when she heard of it, was pleased with Ralegh’s proposal, particularly as she could shift the taxing burden of military troops to the nobles of Munster province, but when Lord Grey heard from Lord Burlegh of the ‘plott delivered by Captain Rawley unto her Majesty’ he considered Ralegh but an opinionated junior, ‘perpetually differing’, always with a self confident better idea, always thinking he knew best but “for myne owne Part”, he said, “I must bee playne: I nether like his carriage nor his company”. Sir Robert Naught wrote: “He had gotten the Queen’s eare at a trice, and she began to be taken with his elocution, and loved to hear his reasons to her demands: and the truth is, she took him for a kind of Oracle, which netled them all”.

Ralegh’s elegy to Sidney was published along with sixteen of his other poems in ‘The Phoenix Nest’, 1593, an anthology of the “refined workes of Noble men, worthy Knights, gallant Gentlemen, Masters of Arts, and brave Schollers. Full of verietie, excellent invention, and singular delight. Never before this time published. Set foorth by R.S. of the Inner Temple Gentlemen”. This anthology contained poems by Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, Nicholas Breton, Sir Edward Dyer, and Sir William Herbert.

Ralegh was a patron for the minor poet, Matthew Roydon, and for mathematicians, Robert Hues and Walter Warner and Thomas Hariot, called the ‘Three Magi’ who assisted Henry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland, called the Wizard Earl, Ralegh’s long time friend and fellow prisoner in the Tower. A long list of authors dedicated their books to Ralegh. Among his friends were the historian, William Camden, teacher of Ben Jonson, Lancelot Edwards, a translator of the Authorized Version of the Bible, Richard Hakluyt who wrote ‘Voyages’, John Stowe who wrote ‘Survey of England’, and the antiquaries, Sir Robert Cotton, Richard Carew and John Hooker who wrote of Ralegh’s exploits at sea in his supplement to Holinshed’s Chronicles, published in Another1586.fable concerning Ralegh was the ‘Mermaid Club’ first mentioned by the unreliable John Aubrey who, at the end of the 16th century, in referring to Sir Francis Stuart, noted that “he was a learned Gentleman, and one of the Club at the Mermayd, on Fryday Street, with Sir Walter Ralegh, etc, of that Sodalitie: heroes and Witts of that time”. There is no basis to believe that Sir Walter, the Captain of the Queen’s Guard, rubbed shoulders or clanked tankards with the lads at the Mermaid or to believe that any occasional gathering of poets or playwrights there was ever a Club organized by Ralegh or that Marlowe ever went there.

No mention is made of who is ‘R.S.’ although Sir Robert Smythe was one of Ralegh’s City associates, London merchants who invested in his colonization efforts and who was appointed a trustee, along with John Shelbury, of Ralegh’s money and goods when he was imprisoned on December 16th, 1603 for 13 years in the Tower.

It also contained several of Ralegh’s most famous poems including: “Like truthless dreams’, ‘Like to a Hermite poor’ and ‘The Excuse’: “But when I found my selfe to you was true, I lou’d my selfe, because my selfe lou’d you.”

The only mention of such assemblies occurred a generation later during the reign of James I when Ralegh was locked in the Tower. The playwright Francis Beaumont wrote to Ben Jonson saying, “What things we have seen done at the Mermaid”, referring to a time after 1605. Biographers, writing about that part of the century, were little concerned with accuracy of the years as to them the era was what they referred to only as ‘at that time’. Much of the legend of ‘Shakespeare’ is tacked together with such anachronisms, the legend depending upon ignoring the accuracy of dates. The famous ‘School of Night’ that Ralegh was to have conducted within the walls of Durham House, his residence around the bend of the Thames from Whitehall Palace, was also a fiction that found its way into coinage in a later century. There was no ‘School of Night’, an ominous title that others gave to Ralegh’s friends, those Magi of Mystery, that cult of conjurors and sceptics who would dare peer though telescopes to impugn the purity of the Sun and the Moon and to presume to know the future path of ‘shooting stars’. Since Ralegh lived at the same time as the Plays on stage, it became a fad among future historians to find cryptic meanings concerning Ralegh in the play about courtiers, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, originally titled, ‘Loues Labore Lost’ that could be ‘Love is Labour Lost’. Why was this title changed to ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ rather than ‘Love’s Labour is Lost” ? The ‘labour of love is lost’ makes sense but adding the apostrophe to ‘Labour’s’ makes the title ‘Love’s Labour’(ha)s Lost . . .what’ ?

Ralegh’s friends included, foremost, Thomas Hariot, 31 year old mathematician and delver into the study of many things. He was the unidentified ‘certain necromantic astrologer’, ‘that Epicure and Magus’, although the Queen’s astrologer and science advisor, old Jon Dee, also a friend of Ralegh, felt that the libellous reference would be construed as meaning him. If the thinker’s cap fits. Two groups are always in danger, those who ally themselves to political figures and those who express opinions on any matter in their writings.

In their imaginations these ‘historians of William’ found Ralegh in the character of Don Adriano, Thomas Hariot in Holofernes, and Queen Elizabeth in the Princess of France. The Country Wench is seen as Ralegh’s wife, Bess Throckmorton. It is a game in which all can join: Ralegh organized the ships to sail against the Armada (Armado); the name of one of his stepbrothers was Adrian (Adriano), thus making Ralegh into ‘Don Adriano de Armado’.

Delving deep into the recesses of Act IV, Scene 3 of ‘L.L.L’, the King is found to say, ‘by heaven, thy love is black as ebony’, to which the Lord Biron [not Lord Byron] replies, ‘No face is fair that is not full so black’. The King exclaims, ‘O paradox ! Black is the badge of hell, the hue of dungeons and the school of night’. Therefore, Ralegh and his devils from the dungeons of hell, the Tower, must have been held at his house, the ‘School of Night’ ! Most all biographers of Ralegh, Marlowe, Hariot and Chapman eventually allude to the faction of fiction, the dreaded ‘School of Night’, the name given to those friends that met for inspired conversation at Ralegh’s.

The early versions of the play read: “and the school of night’ but ‘school’ has been changed over the centuries to ‘stole’, ‘soul’, ‘seal’, ‘shade’, ‘school’ or ‘suit’ and finally the ‘scowl of night’ as found in modern print to match the blackness of all the other words in the conversions. If a word of the Bard is unpleasing, then feel free to choose another. Some still prefer the original, a misprint or not, ‘Black’, they say, ‘is the hue worn by all who belong to the school or brotherhood of night’. No ‘School of Night’ ? Then surely a school much blacker ! In 1591, a much published, widely-read tract, ‘The Responsio”, accused Ralegh of the indefensible charge of nurturing a ‘School of Atheism’, the damning but vague epithet for a free thinker, a con conformist or a questioner of orthodox views on science or man. The accusation alone was sufficient, needing no proof or logic, only the word of a spy or a jealous liar. ‘The Responsio’ read in part: “Certainly if the school of atheism of Walter Ralegh flourishes longer, which he is well known to have in his house, with a certain necromantic astrologer as teacher, so that no small number of noble youths mock at the old law, laughing at their bright jokes and witticisms among themselves, if, as I say, this school should take root and grow strong, and Ralegh himself was chosen for the Council, what else must be expected but at some time or other an edict drawn up by that Epicure and Magus, Ralegh’s teacher, and published in the Queen’s name, in which every single divine being, every soul’s immortality clearly, briefly and without argument denied, and all would be accused of lese majeste, as though they were disturbers of the state who against that kind of doctrine raised any scruples or moved any opposition.”

This is saying that if Ralegh’s ideas were in control, any who questioned those ideas would be suppressed as we now suppress any who questions our ideas. Then, as now.it is not a matter of what is right but who has the might to say what is right. Ralegh, with these accusations against him, is already marked for death as Marlowe was, and if such as man of high esteem were threatened, so were they all who chose his company or shared his thoughts at this time of 1591 and Marlowe was accused of holding similar vile views as Ralegh.

“I hear say there be Mathematicians abroad that will prove men before Adam, and they are harboured in high places who will maintain it to the death, that there are no devils.”

One can advance himself by tying his wagon to a particular illustrious star, a presently popular person of rank, but should that figure fall from favour, the danger is also present of following him to disgrace or to the Tower. Such alliances can easily be avoided, by cultivating no kinship with colourful courtiers. Not so convenient an option have the writers, the poets and playwrights and men of science. To write is to express an opinion. To write upon what can be seen though the telescope glass clearly is to contradict those who believe in superstitions and in what their grandmothers believed as what our forebears said must be true as they believed. Most imperative is to obey what the priest says as this was ordained in ancient times and those who do not believe will be met with fire. Among the ‘no small number of noble youths’ are the poets, the most active were Kyd, Peele, Lodge, Chapman, Marlowe and Greene all in their twenties or early thirties.George Chapman was writing poems and giving dedicatory letters in his ‘The Shadow of Night’ that advocated a life of study and not the life of the Epicure. He praises ‘deep searching Northumberland’, Henry Percy, the Wizard Earl, a friend of the Magi, and Thomas Hariot whom Chapman called ‘the Mayster of all essentiall and true knowledge’. Some see Chapman as the subject of Sonnet 86, ‘Was it the proud full sail of his great verse’, that others see as a reference to Marlowe. The sonnet’s line seven, ‘No, neither he, nor his compeers by night’ echoes Chapman’s ‘sacred night’, ‘imperial night’ and his ‘No pen can anything eternal wright, that is not steept in humour of the night’.

Every mention of Marlowe since his death invariably includes accusations made against him as being true. Marlowe was reported to have “read the atheist lectures to Ralegh”. Marlowe said that “Moses was but a juggler”. “Marlowe said that” - but who said that he made these statements ? When Richard Baines was interrogated by the Privy Council, he gave several utterances, that Marlowe said “that Moses was but a juggler, and that one Heriot being Sir Walter Ralegh’s man can do more than he [Moses]”, and that Marlowe boasted that he had “read the atheist lecture to Sir Walter Ralegh and others”.

He, too, was a friend of Robert Greene who in his last writing warned Christopher Marlowe not to associate with those men and their ideas, as they were open to charges of atheism.

Robert Greene in the following year, 1592, was writing his final works including two history plays and his admonition to Marlowe, Nashe and Peele. Marlowe was 28 and Thomas Nashe was 25 in 1592. Nashe had just written several pamphlets in answer to the satiric attacks by the Puritan, ‘Martin Marprelate’, on the Church of England and he was now writing his “Pierce Pennilesse, his supplication to the Divell’, in which he protested against the public’s neglect of worthy writers.

A poet could couch his couplets in metaphor wherein subtle meanings could be hard to prove, but the playwright who brought his messages to life enacted by breathing players upon a public stage where all actions were real and emotions could sweep across a fascinated crowd, but such a man was bold, unequivocal in his intent of meaning, yet naked of any defence against scurrilous attack. That man was Marlowe. Of all the poets, dramatists, thinkers and writers, he was the most easily damned. He was friends with most of them, Hariot, Chapman, Ralegh, and was he not the one who portrayed the infamous Doctor Faustus upon the stage and did he not cause the actual Latin phrases of incantation to be mouthed upon that same stage, day after day, to raise up the very Devil from Hell ? Doctor Faustus had merely sold his soul to the Devil, Marlowe would lie in degradation for at least the next 500 years.

Kyd’s room was searched for evidence of the flyers that had been posted about the City of London denouncing shopkeepers as foreign but he was arrested for having, not documents, but a printed copy of the writing that had been openly published and available for many years. The print contained sentences that were examples of such heretical statements but that were later denounced as stated further in the tract. Kyd was arrested for having among his papers a quite common publication that was approved. References in other books imply that the ‘papers’ were ‘written’ by Marlowe and were in his handwriting. Another example: In ‘Sir Walter Ralegh’ by N. L. “TheWilliams:dramatist, Thomas Kyd, at a loose end while the theatres were closed, had written inflammatory leaflets against foreign shopkeepers and he was arrested for fomenting trouble. In his rooms were found papers which denied the divinity of Christ.” Now it is imagined that it was Kyd not Marlowe who ‘wrote’ what was not ‘papers’ but one printed leaflet that anyone could buy on the street. There is no mention of the real publication that was found and it is of no purpose for N. L. Williams to drop in the scholarly information about the theatres being closed during the plague, as dramatists were not affected by the closure. Writers do not stop writing simply because the Theatre is closed as if they waited to dash off plays just before the opening curtain.Thomas Kyd, under torture, said that the ‘paper’ found in his room belonged to Marlowe but became mixed with his own writings during the time Marlowe lived with him. Marlowe was arrested. The Privy Council deferred his trial but commanded that he report to them in London daily. Marlowe stayed then with the Walsinghams at their estate south of the Thames and the town of Greenwich at this time.

Baines was a spy for Sir Francis Walsingham. Baines knew what the Council wanted to hear: “Marlowe is able to show more sound reason for atheism than any divine in England is able to give to prove divinity”.

That was Baines’ statement to the Council but it obviously is the opinion of either Baines or someone else, not Marlowe. The most ridiculous but most damning statement made by Baines was to say that another spy, Richard Cholmeley, told him that Marlowe had converted Cholmeley to atheism, as if Cholmeley could be converted to anything unless he was willing to be convinced. Cholmeley was not arrested for his conversion. Cholmeley also said that Marlowe told him “that he had read the atheist lecture to Sir Walter Ralegh and others” as if Marlowe, if indeed he did read a lecture to Ralegh would have called it an ‘an atheist lecture’ It would be Cholmeley’s opinion that the lecture was atheistic or he invented the conversation.

‘Loues Labore Lost’ (Q1 1598) has long been a puzzle. Why was it written, what was its purpose ? It has no obvious basis in history, so was it an allegory on the contemporary scene in London ? The play became a pastime of later critics, finding in the play’s characters, the living person Ralegh, his teacher, and his two ‘loves’ but they cover only the characters of Don Adriano, Holofernes, the Princess of France and Jaquenetta.

No person is more maligned than Marlowe by the biographers of William. No incident is more flagrantly reported in those biographies than the raid on Thomas Kyd’s room in May of 1593. In his book, ‘Sir Walter Raleigh’, John Winton says: “On the 12th May, the dramatist Thomas Kyd, author of the Spanish Tragedy, was arrested on suspicion of having written certain libellous attacks on foreigners (many of them Huguenots from France) then being in London. Amongst Kyd’s belongings were found documents which were held to be heretical.”

The play at one time was thought to be written in 1590 and then the date was set at 1593. No one knows for certain but that it lies between those two dates. These were the beginning years that Thomas Nashe waged a literary battle with Gabriel Harvey. Nashe was 23 in 1590, when he wrote his pamphlets in answer to the satiric attacks on the Church of England by ‘Martin Marprelate’. Nashe wrote these, ‘an Almond for a Parrat’, under the pen name of ‘Pasquil’ [pass the quill?]. He later wrote his ‘Pierce Penniless, his supplication to the Divell’ in answer to the Harvey brothers, Gabriel and Richard’s ‘Plaine Perceval’ and ‘The Lamb of God’ in which they rebuked both Nashe and Greene who had sneered at the whole Harvey family in his pamphlet of 1592, ‘Quip for an Upstart Courtier’. Greene, in his ‘A Groatsworth of Wit’, warned Nashe, whom he calls ‘Young Iuvenall, that byting satyrist’ of the danger in being ‘too bitter against scholars’ meaning the Harveys. In ‘Loues Labore Lost’, the character Armado addresses his page, ‘Moth’, as ‘my tender juvenal’ and so Thomas Nashe is seen as the character ‘Moth’ in the play, and Moth is punning perpetually on purses and pennies that Nashe often did in his ‘Pierce Penniless’. Both Nashe and Greene were clever with words. Nashe was ‘uproarious and outrageous’ in ridiculing Harvey in his ‘Strange News of the intercepting Certaine Letters’ or ‘Four Letters Confuted’, his 1593 answer to Harvey’s sermon to Nashe and to the, by now, dead Greene in his ‘Four Letters’.

Marlowe, then, was completely familiar with the historical subjects of ‘Navarre’, he was closely associated with Hariot and the others of Ralegh’s group, he was closely associated with Nashe, Greene and Chapman, all those who are seen as having links and personification in the interweaving of contemporary situations in London in 1592 that are parodied in ‘L.L.L.’.

‘L.L.L’ is an amalgam of plays on words, clever puns, and doggerel. It is a world of words and much of it is lost on the modern playgoer not being so in tune with the scene in London ‘at that time’. The literary historians, Furnivall, Dowden and Sir Sidney Lee of the 19th century all believed that ‘L.L.L’ was the earliest of all ‘Shakespeare’s plays’. This would place it even before the Henry VI plays. H. B. Charleton (1918) argued that the first version was written in the latter part of 1592 and Prof J. Q. Adams (1923) agreed that 1592 was the earliest possible date. However, the Henry VI plays and their previous versions were written before 1592. From the events in the plot, ‘L.L.L.’ was written by the spring of 1593, the situation of Armado with Jaquenetta in the play is the same as Ralegh’s predicament with Bess Throckmorton, a possible and likely reason for his falling from the Queen’s favour in 1592. Not until 1880 was any notice taken that ‘L.L.L.’ contained four characters that had true historical basis: Ferdinand, King of Navarre with Henry IV, Henry of Navarre, Lord Biron or Berowne with the King’s general Marshall Biron, Lord Longeville with the Duc de Longeville, and Lord Dumain with the King’s opponent, the Duc du Maine or Mayenne who was brother to the Duc de Guise. These were the famous people that Christopher Marlowe portrayed in his 1589 play, ‘The Massacre at Paris’ known also a ‘The Guise’. At that time, the story was very contemporary as the Duc died shortly after this play was produced.

George Chapman’s lines from his ‘Shadow of the Night’ which was not published until 1594, finds a parallel in the character Biron’s word: “Never durst poet touch pen to write until his ink were temper’d with love’s sighs”.

Marlowe had every opportunity to have personal knowledge or reliable information about the current events inside and outside of Court. The play is seen as being hostile to Ralegh in that he is possibly parodied in the part of Don Adriano de Armado but if these are single and combined characterizations on then living people, they are all of them parodied.

The Dumaine ‘ode’ was also published the following year, 1600, in the anthology, ‘England’s Helicon’.

In 1934, a Miss F.A. Yates saw the play’s content as ‘Ralegh insulting Essex’, and his friends insulting Essex’s sisters, and that ‘Shakespeare’ takes up their defence as a ‘protégé of Essex’s friend, Southampton.

The two ‘sonnets’ published in William Jaggard’s 1599 volume of poems called ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ were two sonnets from ‘L.L.L.’, that of Biron (Act IV, Sc iii, 110 123) and that of Longaville (IV iii 60 73) along with Dumaine’s ‘ode’ (IV iii 101 120). Often the biographers call Jaggard’s collection ‘pirated’, but upon which supposition ? The title page of ‘L.L.L.’, 1598, had said ‘by W. Shakespere’ and that is the way Jaggard credited all of ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’, even though the volume contained the poetry of several authors.

The play, ‘L.L.L.’, now supposed as written by ‘William’, his ‘first play’, is considered to be presented for the delight of those who were in opposition to Ralegh, who were Essex’s men including the Earl of Southampton, and it is supposed to be “for a private performance in the house of some grandee who had opposed Ralegh and Ralegh’s men”, possibly at the Earl of Southampton’s domicile To write such a play, however it may have alluded to Walter Ralegh or to any other of Marlowe’s friends, would never have given Marlowe cause for timidity. He had all the temerity in the world and would have known how this play would be taken by any of them. William of Stratford, however, is not known to have any contact with the Court or with any other notables and the man whom his biographers paint would never have had the courage to write anything that may have been construed as parodying anyone at the Court. If, at the time of the writing of the play, Ralegh was out of favour and Essex was well within, the play would still endure longer than the fortune of any courtier that turned upon the whim of the Queen. Where would the ‘well known’ William be when Ralegh or Essex and with him, Southampton, exchanged places in and out of the Tower Biographers?of

The printer was W.W., William White, who had only recently set up his printing business. The publisher was ‘Cutbert Burby’ whereas many biographers list this name as ‘Cuthbert’ changing the name from ‘Cutbert’ but maintaining the family name as ‘Burby’ without changing it to ‘Burbadge’. They make all mention of ‘Burby’ as if he were a person separate from Burbadge. ‘Burby’ is also listed as the publisher of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in the same way in 1599, the title page also stating that the edition was ‘newly corrected and augmented’. There is no mention of the name of the corrector and augmenter and the name of the author is never mentioned on any Quarto edition of ‘Romeo and Juliet’. This edition was to supplant the 1597 edition printed by Danter. Why was ‘L.L.L.’s correction credited to ‘W. Shakespere’ but not on ‘Romeo and Juliet’ a year later since the same publisher, ‘Burby’, was involved ?

The title page of the Quarto edition, 1598, of ‘L.L.L.’ reads: “A PLEASANT conceited Comedy CALLED , Loves Labors Lost. As it vvas presented before her Highness this last Christmas. Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere. Imprinted at London by W.W. for Cutbert Burby. 1598”.

William are almost smug in their confidence that William wrote ‘L.L.L.’, content that William would be on comfortable ground being on the right political side, safe within the protection of his ‘patron’, Southampton, sycophant of the Earl of Essex, the enemy of the deposed Ralegh in the summer of 1592. It would be open season on Ralegh and all his lot in portraying them flippantly to have the ladies giggling behind their fans.

Biographers have said that there were no copyrights ‘in that time’ and that the author of a play sold it to the theatre owner with whom the ownership remained until he wished to sell it to a publisher. The ‘Yale Shakespeare’, 1925, says that the ‘property rights’ to ‘L.L.L.’ ‘are affirmed’ when Burby transferred this play along with ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘Taming of the Shrew’ over to Nicholas Linge on January 22, 1606 7 who on November 19 of the same year, 1607, transferred the three plays to one of the publishers of the first Folio, John Smethwick.

The attacks and counter-attacks in the Martin Marprelate tracts contributed considerably to the uneasiness some felt for their security in the early 1590’s.

That is the only reason that these gatherings had their effect upon the early 1590’s, that not Ralegh’s parliamentary or city business associates but his personal friends and he were suspected of being ‘subversive thinkers’ and openly accused of printing certain tracts.

Armado: The fox, the ape, and the humble bee, Were at odds, being but three. Moth: Until the goose came out of door, and stay’d the odds by adding four.”

Then Moth speaks the same ‘moral’ and Armado repeats the same ‘l’envoy’. Does the ‘ape’ refer to the ‘Martin’ of ‘Martin Marprelate’ ? A similar four line verse, a motto rhyme appeared on the title page of the anti Martinist publication, ‘Martin’s Months Minde’: “Martin the ape, the dronke, and the Madde, The three Martins are, whose workes we have had. If Martin the fourth comes, after Martin so euill Nor man, nor beast comes but Martin the deuill.”

Well known people were often assigned code names of animals or numbers so that conversation could relate that No. 3 is in collusion with No.4. The current delight is in solving who the fox and who the goose in the play and who the dronke and the madde in the other verse. Each rhyme alluded to three persons with a fourth added.

“The secret society of Sir Walter Ralegh” is no puzzle as there was no ‘society’ and even in Ralegh’s day, his group of friends was never considered to be ‘secret’, a term that was applied only by writers of the 20th century. Everyone knew the identity of Ralegh’s friends who occasionally gathered at his house on the Thames for friendly discussions.

In the ‘Arden Shakespeare’, the editor of the Fourth Edition (1951), Richard Davis, links this play, ‘L.L.L.’, with a “series of unsolved puzzles” of the early 1590’s: “The elusive Martin Marprelate, the lost years of William Shakespeare, the secret society of Sir Walter Raleigh, the stabbing of Christopher Marlowe, the riddle of ‘Willobie and his Avisa’”. The editor at least sees that there may be a purpose in examining those early 1590’s and that solving these ‘puzzles’ may explain the times. In those few years, 1591 1594, some important events were occurring simultaneously and whether or not each had some effect upon the other, some special significance may be found in examining these ‘puzzles’ to determine whether they had an y bearing upon the events.

“The elusive Martin Marprelate” was probably no more elusive than any other pamphleteer as ‘Martin Marprelate’ was the pen name for the Puritan or more likely the Puritan persons who wrote tracts attacking the established Church. The word ‘martin’ was the Elizabethan vernacular for an ‘ape’ or ‘monkey’ and so the pen name could be to ‘Ape’ or to ‘mar prelates’ of the established Church. In ‘L.L.L.’ Adriano de Armado’ speaks a two line doggerel called a ‘moral’ to which his servant, Moth, replies a two line answer called a ‘l’envoy’. The ‘moral’ is repeated twice again in III ii 82 95, the entire scene is one of mysterious metaphor and possibly is missing any meaning today. “Moth: I will add the l’envoy. Say the moral again.

“The Riddle of Willobie and his Avisa” comes from a 1594 writing that would never have surfaced in modern print if it had not been that it contains two conversing characters identified only as ‘H.W.” and ‘W.S.’. ‘W.S.’ further identifies ‘H.W.’ by addressing him as ‘friend Harry’. This sent desperate for any shred of information on William watchers of later years on a search for further hints of their identities. Was ‘W.H.’ Henry Wriothesly and ‘W.S.’ William himself, or was ‘H.W.” simply Henry Willoughby of West Knoyle, Wiltshire, who graduated from Oxford ? If it is the latter, then ‘W.S.’ was not their William. The poetic dialogue is called ‘Willobie His Avisa’ authored by two writers with the oxymoronic pen name of ‘Vigilantius Dormitanus’, supposedly Roger Wakeman who is ‘vigilant’ and Edmund Napper who is ‘dormant’. The only connection to William in this work is the passing reference, ‘And Shakespeare paints poor Lucrece’s Rape’, which does not indicate knowledge of who is William, only that his was the name printed on the Dedication page of the poem, ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, but biographers make much of it because it is the first time and one of the rare times that William’s name ever appears in any type of book by someone else. The ‘riddle’ of Willobie had no effect upon any of the events of the early 1590’s.

A play was ordered for the new Queen Anne of Denmark who became the wife of James I and thereby, the queen in England. Sir Walter Cope wrote to Viscount Cranborne, Sir Robert Cecil, who was later Lord Salisbury: “Sir, I have sent and bene all thys morning huntyng for players Juglers & Such kinde of Creturs, but fynde them harde to fynde; wherefore leauing notes for them to seek me, Burbadge ys come, and sayes there is no new playe that the queen hath not scene, but they haue reuyued an olde one, called Loves Labore Lost which for wytt & mirthe he sayes will please her exceedingly. And thys ys appointed to be playd to morrowe night at my Lord of Sowthamptons, unless yow send wrytt to remove the corpus sum causa to your howse in Strande. Burbadge is my messenger ready attending your pleasure.”

“The lost years of William Shakespeare” is also not a ‘puzzle’ Why should anything be known of William from the time Shaxper left school until a somewhat similar name appears in the fall of 1593 on the Dedication page of the printed poem ‘Venus and Adonis’ ? The date of William of Stratford’s birth, his marriage, and the birth dates of his immediate family are known as they are listed in Stratford official documents as all records of other residents of the town at that time are known. Yet, this information, although obvious, was never looked for until the middle of the 19th century. Why should there be any record of ‘this man Shakespeare’ anywhere else if he did nothing to warrant his name being recorded or mentioned by someone else ? If he had entered the military service, engaged in a business, attended a university, or Grey’s Inn, or even joined a theatre group before 1594, it would be unusual that his name would not appear somewhere, unless he was totally undistinguished in any endeavour. Documented tracts, easily traceable, were left by minor poets, ordinary Stratford businessmen, teachers, secretaries, mapmakers and personnel on ships. The simplest and most logical reason for the supposed ‘lost years of Shakespeare’ is that he did nothing requiring documentation or nothing worthy of comment in print by other people. Books on his contemporaries are crammed with the names of people that are otherwise unmentioned because the records of that time were numerous. It is amazing how much reliable information is available for those years, and it is even more amazing how much misinformation has been invented in the past 500 years to fill in those ‘lost years’. When all speculation and unfounded adulation are swept away, it is not remarkable to find that William had no effect at all upon those critical years of the ‘early 1590’s, but those early 1590’s had every effect upon “The Stabbing of Christopher Marlowe” that may not have happened.

had no known further performance for over a century. Dryden said in 1672 that this play along with ‘Measure for Measure’ and ‘A Winter’s Tale’ “which were either grounded in impossibilities, or at least so meanly written, that the comedy neither caused your mirth, nor the serious part your concernment” and were the worst of the plays. Gildon in 1710 rated ‘L.L.L.’ as “one of the worst of Shakespeare’s plays, nay, I think I may say, the very worst”. Why did the Queen send Walter Ralegh to the Tower in the summer of 1592 ? It was recorded in Camden’s ‘Annales’ for the year 1595: “Walter Ralegh, Captain of the Queen’s Guards, for defiling the honour a of a lady of the Queen whom he afterwards let in marriage dismissed from favour and kept in prison for many months, is now set free but banished from the Court”. The accepted reason for imprisonment is his marriage with Bess Throckmorton or at least the manner of it, that he had not asked the Queen’s permission and had not informed her of their marriage.

This letter is dated ‘1604’. The date of the performance referred to is between January 8 and January 15, 1604/5 as listed in the audits accounts: “By his Majesty’s players” of “a play Loues Labore Lost” between the New Year’s Day and Twelfth Day. The New Year began ‘at that time’ on March 25, thus any day from January 1 to that date was recorded at that time as being in the previous year and is now recorded as in the latter year, thus it is now shown as January 15, 1604/5. Neither in the letter nor in the audit office accounts is the author of ‘Loues Labore Lost’ mentioned, though in 1604/5 ‘William’ is supposed to be at the height of his ‘fame’ and this is six years after the Quarto of 1598 when his name is printed on the title page only as ‘corrected and augmented by W Shakespere’. In the Quarto version of ‘L.L.L.’ a number of unusual printing errors is found, phrases at loose ends, meaningless fragments included and unclear references to some of the characters. One or two of these have been explained by the supposition that the author marked the copy which the printer used to make the printing not by drawing a pen through the lines to be excised but by enclosing them with a margin bracket and the lower part of the bracket slashed through part of the last line. The printer omitted the line cut into by the bracket all but two words and left in the lines bracketed for omission. This may or may not have happened in this way but it is given as an example of the author’s carelessness. In this play as with several others, a later Quarto seems to be corrected from an earlier printed Quarto and not from an original manuscript as some obvious errors are repeated in the second Quarto exactly as they appear in the first. The question arises of why the original manuscript is not used, and in the case of ‘L.L.L.’ why there are so many omissions and mix ups. In Act II, scene 1, Biron speaks to Katharine in the Quarto and to Rosaline in the Folio and in another scene of the Folio, it is Katharine who appears when it should be Rosaline in both versions. ‘Printer’s error’ does not explain the muddles. Why is proofreading obviously totally lacking not only in the first Quarto version but in the second ? Why would it be surmised that it is the author who slashed through the lines or carelessly bracketed unwanted lines, or by anyone else who would choose to revise certain sections for a performanceBiographer?

A.L. Rowse says that when a ‘bad’ Quarto appeared, there was nothing left but for the Author to make a good one. Yet, William never had any play printed and he made no attempt to make a good Quarto of those ‘bad’ Quartos published by ‘Cutbert Burby’ who brought out Quartos also of ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in 1594. Since it was ‘Cutbert Burby’, seemingly Cuthbert Burbadge, the owner, why has so much support been given by all biographers to ‘statements’ purportedly made by ‘Heminge and Condell’ in the Dedication that all published editions of the plays before the Folio were “stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors”?‘L.L.L.’

On the 10th of April another entry in the diary states: “Damerei Raelly was baptized by Robert Earlle of Essexes and Arth Throkemorton and Anna Throkemorton” who was Arthur’s wife. Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, was god father to the child of the man whom Essex was supposed to be at rivalry to the point of enmity ? Then Essex, too, had kept silent, agreeing to violate his duty to inform the Queen and risk his own career ? All of this is too incredible, and multiple incredulities suggest falsity, that the Queen knew of this, if not from the very beginning, at least for a long enough time that would eliminate this as being the reason for Ralegh’s fall from Court favour, but what, then, could be the cause of his prison term ?

A reference to treason being his crime is found in Camden’s ‘Annales’ but that edition was printed in 1627 long after his execution, and is typical of legends invented long after the events. Unreliable Aubrey embellished a legend of Walter’s encounter with Bess that begins: “He loved a wench well” wherein Aubrey related all of her outcries verbatim as if he would know what was said in the privacy of a woods even if there had been such an encounter, and this claim came after almost one hundred years. It is well stated that nothing would induce the Queen’s anger more than a courtier secretly marrying one of her ladies in waiting, yet this did not seem to deter many of the prominent men in her Court nor the ladies in waiting. Already in 1598, her lifetime favourite, Robert Dudley caused her displeasure in marrying Lettice Devereaux, the Earl of Essex’ widowed mother, and the Earl’s sister, Dorothy Devereaux secretly married, in 1587, Sir Thomas Perrot who had been an opponent of Ralegh, and two years later Essex himself secretly married Sir Philip Sidney’s widow, Frances Walsingham, all occurring before Ralegh’s disfavour in 1592. They all had raised the Queen’s wrath but not sufficiently to send anyone to prison. A possible secret marriage to Bess Throckmorton, then, was not entirely the reason for the fall of Ralegh.

Bess, at the age of 27 was the oldest lady in waiting and was certainly not the most attractive, but she was the only woman who took Ralegh’s fancy in all his ten years at Court. No gossip ever linked him to anyone else and gossip about his romance with Bess strangely never reached the ear of the Queen.

The month and the day are probably correct; the year, even if it were 1591, would still prove that the charge of ‘defiling the honour of a Lady of the Queen whom he afterwards led in marriage’ is not true, as Damerei was not born until March 29, 1592, as her brother Arthur, recorded in his diary: “My sister was delyvered of a boye between 2 and 3 in the afternowne”.

A deposition in relation to a law suit over her inheritance reads that “on 20th day of February in the thirtieth year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, or thereabouts, the aforesaid Elizabeth Throckmorton accepted as her man Walter Ralegh, knight”. This would place the date of the wedding as the 20th of February, 1588/9 that would mean the unbelievable concealment of their marriage, a full pregnancy and the birth of their child, Damerei, with no word of any of this reaching the Queen in a gossip filled Court for four years, an incredible accomplishment with Bess being a lady-in-waiting.

Other than outright treason for which no evidence was ever forwarded, the only plausible reason would be the recent but constant accusations of his espousing atheism. Some such accusations were made almost in sport. The poet, Sir John Harington, bandied in print with Ralegh and had said of him, “You that will lose a friend, to coine a jest”. He had written at least a dozen epigrams on Ralegh accusing him in verse of being one of “scorn and deep derision”, of having a “scoffing fashion” and being a “greedy fish”. When Ralegh accused Harington of too often plagiarizing the classical poets, John Harington responded with a clever poem on Ralelgh’s legal piracy that ended with:

When Ralegh was condemned to death years later under James I, this Sir John Harington, poet and translator for the Queen, wrote to Doctor Still, the bishop of Bath and Wells that Ralegh, he was sure, had no “evil design in point of faith or religion, As he hath oft discoursed to me with much learning, wisdom and freedom, I knew he doth sometimes differ in opinion from some others, but I think also his heart is well fixed in every honest thing as far as I can look into him”. By that time, it was too late for truth, the accusations, however, jousted with wit and humour, were enough. Ralegh would die on the gallows.

Harington’s most serious charge against the man he always named ‘Proud Paulus’ was one of atheism, but this, too, was almost done in a light teasing vein.

While in the Tower in 1592, Ralegh wrote several fine poems, his ‘Ocean to Cynthia’ alone over 500 lines long, as well as letters to the Queen while conducting his duties and business from the prison room but the only key that opened his prison gate was his power to fill the Queen’s coffers with the richest prize that ever sailed into an English port. His ships at sea had captured the largest ship ever seen; the ‘Madre di Dios’ had landed at Dartmouth and its rich cargo was being plundered by men who were killing each other to steal the pearls, rubies and diamonds aboard. Elizabeth the Queen knew that only Ralegh could assure her of receiving her invested share of the Spanish booty. Ralegh left the prison and issued the Queen 80,000 pounds, four times her rightful share along with a note: “If God have sent it for my ransom, I hope her Majesty of her abundant goodness will accept it”. Most of the following year, the Raleghs lived in Dorset at Sherbourne Castle that he leased from the Queen after giving her a jewel worth 250 pounds. He was still a member of the Queen’s parliament. It was the plague year of 1593. A pamphlet printed the year before was still being passed about. It was called ‘Sir Walter Rauley’s School of Atheism’.

“Proud Paulus, led by Sadduces infection Doth not believe the bodies’s resurrection. Well, Paulus, this I now believe indeed, That who in all, or part, denys his Creed; Went he to sea, land, hell, I would agree, A friend worse then himself, he could not see.”

Had they known anyone who had cursed because He had rained upon their sport ? The only witness with much to say was the Reverend Ralph Ironside who described in detail a long verbal fencing that he had indulged in with Walter Ralegh and Walter’s brother Carew upon the question of ‘What is the soul?’ in which Ironside maintained that sometimes it is necessary to argue in a circle. Ralegh was never called as a witness and the inquiry had no further effect upon him except to further establish suspicion about him and his friends.

“Then Fellow Theife, lets shake together hands Sith both our wares are fillcht from forren lands. You’le spoile the Spaniards, by your wit of Mart: And I the Romanes rob, by wit, and Art.”

The seeds of suspicion sown in the years 1592 and 1593, however flippantly they were scattered about, soon bore poisoned fruit. By early 1594, the seeds had sprouted deep roots in certain minds. The commissioners in Causes Ecclesiastical held an inquiry into these accusations of atheism taking evidence in March. The witnesses, most of them local parsons, were asked if they knew now or had ever known anyone known to be or to have been suspected of being or even rumoured of being suspected of aposty or atheism. Had they knowledge of anyone who had asked what or where God is ?

So might run the brief proceedings in the Trial of Christopher Marlowe in May and it would take no more. All would be over. The proud full sail of his great verse would sink into obscure oblivion. The pen that poured out verse as England had never heard before would never again be o’er flowing with illustrious figures yet unborn onto his unwritten pages where they would live forever upon the stages of the world. As he was commanded on May 20, 1593, every day Marlowe had to appear and register before the Privy Council in London. Every day he had to make the dreaded journey from the home of Thomas Walsingham at his Scadbury estate house at Chistlehurst some ten miles to the south of Greenwich and more than twenty to London and more than twenty back. Each day he had to relinquish the safety of being a houseguest in the country to risk the plague in the City and each day brought him closer to the day of his trial.

Already in 1589, Francis Ket, a tutor to Christopher Marlowe was found guilty of atheism and he was burned at the stake. Marlowe could imagine the fateful charge: “These are the atheist friends and heretical comrades of one Christopher Marlowe: Thomas Hariot, Walter Ralegh , Robert Greene, deceased; Francis Ket, deceased and condemned to the stake. What need we of further witnesses ? Marlowe hath given thee Doctor Faustus, he who dared to sell his soul to the devil. Thee have heard the blasphemy ! What say thee ?”

With a figure like Ralegh, the Commissioners would have to be quite sure of the charge but his friends were not so well guarded as he by a standing at Court.

The ‘examination’ was an engagement with Moody in theological debate with four clergymen including the same Ralph Ironside who had testified to his debate with Ralegh at the inquiry. Ralegh, who was present during the ‘examination’, found Moody’s view so interesting that the two of them debated on theology all night. Moody, who proved to be the Blessed John Cornelius, a very well known priest at Dorset, was tried, convicted of high treason, but Cornelius was so well respected in the area that no person in the great crowd that thronged about the gallows would come forward to draw and quarter him alive as the law demanded and no one would even provide a cauldron in which to boil his several dismembered parts. Cornelius wanted to speak to the crowd but Ralegh stopped him on the ladder to prevent any violence. Instead, the executioner hanged him and nailed his head to the gallows.

Within a month, Ralegh was sent by Lord Cecil to ‘take an examination’ of a priest who had been betrayed, captured at a house where he could not say Grace at a Protestant table, and arrested through treachery. Ralegh wrote Cecil saying: “He calls hyme sealf John Moody, but he is an Irishman and a notabell stout villayne and I thinke he can say miche.”

These years were perilous years, but only slightly more dangerous than other years for the free thinker, the questioner, the debater. A man of Ralegh’s stature in the City was politically powerful quite apart from his being in or out of the Queen’s favour and yet, the jackals of jealousy were ever lurking in the shadows, ready for him to stumble. If so great a public figure as Ralegh was endangered by idle accusations, what chance had the poor poet or playwright who daily placed his opinions before the public ? What chance would Christopher Marlowe have in May of that year 1593, when he would be brought before the Privy Council on the charge of writing heretical papers to deny such papers ? What assurance would anyone give Marlowe, when such ‘papers’ would be placed before him as evidence, that he could prove that these were not of his writing but only a single previously printed paper that was legally distributed for years? Who would be so confident that Marlowe could convince the Privy Council that its witnesses, Richard Baines and Richard Cholmeley, the spies in the pay of the Queen’s Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, were both mischievous liars and villains who would profit from their lies ? Only Walsingham himself could attest to the true and innocent nature of Marlowe and to the falseness of the two witnesses and Walsingham was now dead.

The Fire of my brain be quenched that idle minds may give the lie ?

Let them come, all wind, gall, vinegar and storm !

Almost everything about Walter Ralegh in the Tower was ironic. He was placed there for being a foul, atheistic traitor by the small-minded foul-mouthed King James I. His friends were reviled for being mischievous Machiavells, yet his greatest friend and admirer while in the Tower was the King’s son, young Prince Henry, who hated all that his father did, as Ralegh did everything the King hated. The Prince’s mother, Queen Anne, took Henry to the Tower when he was thirteen to meet Ralegh and, to the Prince, Ralegh was the embodiment of the greatest era of England’s history. He beheld a man in the confines of his cell who had seen everything of the past thirty years and had done even more, sailed the seas, administered against the Armada; he was the Queen’s favourite, and a friend of Spenser and Marlowe. There was not a man of even passing importance or accomplishment whom Ralegh had not known personally, prelates, poets, parliamentarians, playwrights or politicians. All the explorers of the seas and adventurers of the Earth were, in him, standing before the Prince in this little room of stone. In the friendship years that followed, the Prince was to derive his higher learning from Ralegh, who, inspired by such a young, earnest and quick mind, poured out his immense collection of Memories, thoughts and opinions onto paper for the Prince. Was there ever such a free flow from the mind of one only man ? His cry goes out for pens, parchment, more paper to record his judgements on philosophy and politics, economics and ethics, science and metaphysics. The Prince, he feels, must know his ‘Observations on the Royal Navy and Sea Service’, his ‘Discourse of the invention of Ships, Anchor, Compass, etc.’. Lady Ralegh is to search into his ‘sedar chist’ and to send him the bundle of papers and notes on ‘The Art of War at Sea’. He wrote essays on Royal matchmaking, ‘Maxims of State’, ‘Prerogative of Parliaments’. His ‘The Cabinet Council’ that John Milton printed in 1658, recommends high qualities for leaders as ‘The virtuous and vicious examples of princes incite subjects to imitate the same qualities’. For his son, Wat, the same age as the Prince, he had advice similar to that of Lord Burlegh or Polonius. In his ‘Instructions to his Son and Posterity’, came the admonitions to trust God, but not flatterers, put aside extravagance, make no false accusation, shun the quarrelsome, and preserve one’s belongings and books.

My dreams destroyed that the sleep of stupid men be not disturbed ?

My blood would never slake their thirst, they’d cry out and screech for more !

And when all our bones are dropped for table-dogs to fight o’er, They’ll turn upon themselves and cut each other to the floor, Juggling with mendacities, disagreeing on veracities While arguing on the ifs of ghosts and elves on heads of pins. Since all their hatred is circled round my appellation, Then let them take it ! Let them execute my name, bury in clay my reputation !

Why should my golden quill lay dry ?

And what am I to them ? Another course in the banquet of their greedy appetite ?

Why should such a Muse be stopped ?

“And all for what ? To dam the flow of my noble verse ?

To know the name is not to know the Man, the Name is not the Self. What have they in my name ? They but know an apparition. Well, then, farewell to the ghost of me, you are now that elusive elf ! Farewell the Muse of Marlowe ! His voice shall vanish without an echo in the night !

Signal to torch the sulphurous stake, roll out their wrenching rack, And let them be the Nemesis of my Name. They shall not grasp the Genesis of my Fame !”

The curtain that would reveal the universe be dropped, Never to be raised above a flat and stagnant earth ?

All portraits thus presented are many variations on this image, one that has no resemblance to the form that bears a similar name high upon the church wall in Stratford as there stands the likeness of the living man, round face, bald no beard but a small goatee and twirled moustache, a partial smile upon lips that would if living, break forth into a jovial laugh and then relate a witty tale to make his listener laugh, and say, ‘This is truly a most congenial and convivial man, yes, a veritable concordant and convincing man, one who could set all the room to laughter, one who could confess himself in banqueting to all the rout’. The rotund image is of one who in life could have been type cast in the part of Sir John Falstaff, the two being kind, true and valiant, or bravely wishing to be considered so, by over playing the buffoon so not to be thought of truly as a buffoon.The first two issues of Ralegh’s ‘History’ were quickly purchased for 20 to 30 shillings, the Prince’s sister, Elizabeth, taking a copy to Prague. John Milton made notes from his copy, John Hampden was gratified with his, and Cromwell recommended his book to Richard, his son. Two further issues were printed three years later with ten editions in all before the end of the century.

Books were the bread and sustenance of Sir Walter Ralegh, He was considered a minor poet but his prose could be classed only as major. As if his writings on every known subject were not enough to relieve the pain of “those inmost and soul-piercing wounds which are ever aching”, in the long years in the Tower, Ralegh proposed to write ’The History of the World’, a ‘story of all the ages past’. He began soon after meeting the Prince in 1607. His friends would help him. By day he would confer with his friend, Northumberland, the Wizard Earl, his fellow prisoner, and discuss science with Hariot and Hues, their regular visitors, until the five o’clock curfew when both prisoners would go back to their flame lit cold stone rooms. Ben Jonson, who drafted a treatise on the Punic Wars for him to revise, said that Ralegh was similarly served by “the best wits in England”. Dr Robert Burhill did “all or the greatest part of the drudgery of his book, for criticisms, chronology, and reading Greek and Hebrew authors” as Aubrey heard it from Burhill’s wife, and Ralegh borrowed books from the extensive library of the antiquary, Sir RobertTheCotton.‘History’

was the only work from Ralegh’s hand that was printed before his lips ceased moving beneath the executioner. Walter Burre published the ‘History’ on March 29th, 1614, ‘at the sign of the Crane in St Paul’s Churchyard’, with commendatory verse by Ben Jonson, ‘The Minde at the Front’. Oddly the book was printed anonymously, but there was no mistaking the author, he was still alive in the Tower somewhere amid the piles of papers and great stacks of books, for it had taken him to use as authorities, at least 660 known sources, spread out over tables and floor, open books fingered, eyes ever searching for remembered phrases, parchment leaves endlessly turned, forward and back, pages perused, and notes copiously written, and out of them all came streaming rhythmical prose, superb and sublime, even the dullest passages magnificently dull. Walter Ralegh, remembered today only for things that he never did, and unknown for his finest works, was greatly admired in his own time and for years to come for his creationsNo such image appears when reading about the life of ‘William Shakespeare’. It is all vague, diaphanous, clouded with misty figures, but with reassuring biddings not to question the conjured form the biographers present. To the obvious doubts they raise, they repeat before every accomplishment for their man, the phrase, ‘no need to doubt’ and ‘doubtless he attended this gathering’ or ‘he conferred with the Queen, no doubt.’ Before the turn of the first page, they flash the fully vivid portrait in rich colours of a full bearded man with a gold ring in his left ear, like the dandies wore who stood lolling about London street corners in expensive attire announcing to passers by by means of their appearance that they had spent some time in Italy.

The book entitled ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, first printed in 1609, had only two further editions in a century, 1640 and 1710, and not again until 1780 that “showed a lack of interest in the Sonnets”. Similarly, ‘Venus and Adonis’ found no further interest in printing after the first six years. Supposedly living in the same city at the same time as Ralegh, ‘William’ remains in bleak contrast to Ralegh’s literary output in the confines of the Tower with no shortage of friends, but with a firm place in the history of creativity.

Ironic it is that Ralegh is popularly associated in the 20th century only with pipe tobacco while James the King is the man who had his own favourite, Robert Carr, murdered and whose own son said of Ralegh, “Only my father could keep such a bird in a cage”, is constantly and singularly remembered each time anyone utters the phrase, ‘The King James version of the Bible’.

For Ralegh’s writing of this book, the Archbishop of Canterbury, if he read it at all, wrote to the Stationers’ Company on 22 December, 1614, “that the booke latelie published by Sir Walter Rawleigh, nowe prisoner in the Tower, should be suppressed, and not suffered for hereafter to be sould”.

‘William the Poet’ is in bleaker contrast to the major poets of the age. He was never knighted as was Sir Philip Sidney, never made Court Poet and granted a pension as was Ben Jonson and never buried in Westminster as was Edmund Spenser. It is ironic that the man upon whom no one ever made a literary comment in his lifetime, has since been enshrined as ‘The Bard of Avon’, while, with all his books and writings, no one ever dubbed Ralegh as ‘The Bard of Sherbourne’ or the ‘Bard of the Tower of London’. Yet, of the man who had seen and participated in cruelties in the acts of war, George Puttenham said: “For dittie and amorous ode, I find Sir Walter Rawleygh’s vayne most loftie, insolent and passionate’.

Ironic it is that Ralegh, hated by the King, was not a democrat but firmly a monarchist. Ironic it is that although accused of being an atheist, he begins his first chapter of his ‘History’ with these words: “GOD, whom the wisest men acknowledge to be a power ineffable, and virtue infinite; a light by abundant clarity invisible; an understanding which itself can only comprehend; an essence eternal and spiritual, of absolute pureness and simplicity; wonderful magnitude whereof, we behold the image of that glory which cannot be measured, and withal, that one, and yet universal nature which cannot be defined”.

The ‘Sonnets of Shakespeare’ have been a mystery not for their 500 years but only since their re printings in 1870 and 1885. Only then were questions raised of when the Sonnets were written. Were they auto biographical, by whom were they inspired, and who were the subsidiary characters ?

By 1598, there was a sudden falling off of affection for the Sonnet sequences. Since “The Sonnets” have certain echoes of Michael Drayton, they were considered by some to be written mostly during 1594 95, not earlier, and some to be written up to 1598 but they remained in manuscript form until May 20, 1609.

1591 ‘Astrophel and Stella’ Sir Philip Sidney 1592 ‘Delia’ Samuel Daniel 1593 ‘Tears of Fancy’ - Tom Watson 1593 ‘Parthenophil and Parthenope’ Barnabe Barnes 1594 ‘Diana’ Henry Constable 1594 ‘Ideas Mirror’ Michael Drayton 1595 ‘Amoretti’ Edmund Spenser

THE SONNETS Robert J. Meyer

The first question was ‘Why did he turn sonneteer ?’ In the 1590’s, the sonnet-form was in fashion but sonnets were not taken too seriously. Originality was not looked for, only the development of a general theme. To some it was a parlour game where one person would write a few lines then hand them to another for them to complete the sonnet. Some of ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ are looked at as if there was someone else who finished the lines.

The title page reads: “Shakespeares Sonnets. Never before imprinted. At London by G. Eld for T.T. and are to be solde by John Wright dwelling at Christ Church gate. 1609”. John Wright is the bookseller, G. Eld is the printer and T.T. refers to the publisher, Thomas Thorpe. The dedication page reads: “To the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets Mr W.H. all happinesse and that eternitie promised by our everliving poet wisheth the well wishing adventurer in setting forth. T.T.”

The well respected Sir Philip Sidney began the fashion and others followed year after year until the sonnet form quickly went out of fashion in the late 1590’s.

Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, made his first appearance at Whitehall Court in 1584 at the age of seventeen. He was the stepson of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and was related to the Queen by blood through his mother, Lettice Knolleys. His grandmother, the wife of Sir Francis Knolleys, was the sister of Queen Anne Boleyn. Essex soon took Leicester’s place as the Queen’s Court favourite. His Court opponents were the Cecils, William First Lord Burlegh, for forty years the manager of the Queen’s affairs, and his son, Robert, first Earl of Salisbury, who, as Secretary of State, was the Queen’s premier civil servant. Equally opposed to Essex was Walter Ralegh. In 1590, Essex married the widow of Sir Philip Sidney, who was the daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, the Secretary of State before Robert Cecil. As his diplomatic adviser, Essex had Francis Bacon, the Queen’s keeper of the Great Seal. Essex’s sister was Lady Rich, a beautiful and wilful woman of the world who had deserted her consort to live with Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy. Lady Penelope Rich was the inspiration for Philip Sidney’s famous ‘Sonnet Sequences’. She bore seven children by Lord Rich and five by Blount whom she married after her divorce in 1605. Because Lady Penelope Rich was ‘Stella’ of the Sidney Sonnets, there arose the ‘mystery’ of the ‘W.S.’ Sonnets. Sir Philip Sidney’s (1554 1586) collection of sonnets, ‘Astrophel and Stella’ was published in 1591 and these sonnets are considered to be the inspiration for the ‘W.S.’ Sonnets being similar in that a story runs obscurely through the sequence.

Since the writer of the Sonnets had no hand in the printing or in the dedication in the publication, ‘W.H’ is not involved with any meaning in the context of the sonnet sequences. In the 1590’s, sonnet sequences were very fashionable but these sonnets were never intended for publication, nor were they considered a serious work. They are, by comparison with the sonnets of Spenser and Sidney, inferior.

The ‘author’ of the Sonnets never dedicated them to anyone as he did not authorize their publication. It is ‘T.T.’, Thomas Thorpe, who is making the Dedication and it would have been more than presumptuous to dedicate such ‘intimate’ sonnets to some one like Henry Wriothesley that may imply that that person was an intimate of the author. Thomas Thorpe would not be privy to any such knowledge. Thorpe made his own dedication most probably to the one to whom he was indebted for obtaining this collection of papers with the Sonnets inscribed upon them. That person, ‘the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets’, the one who owned them or obtained them for Thorpe, was ‘Mr W.H.”. Thorpe wished the ‘well wishing adventurer’ well, ‘in setting forth’. ‘W.H.’ was leaving town. ‘Beget’ was used in the sense of ‘to get’ or ‘to acquire’. Hamlet bids his players: “You must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness”. ‘Mr. W.H.’ acquired the Sonnets for ‘T.T.’ to publish.

The questions raised by Shakespeare followers in London after the printing of the Sonnets in 1870 are quite pointless but the eagerness to find personal knowledge of this ‘William Shakespeare’ by looking into anything that had been claimed to be of that ‘author’ began to increase with questions about the ‘inner meaning’ of the Sonnets, even to which order they should be arranged to make sense of the supposed ‘story’ and who is being mentioned or referred to in the Sonnets, a youth, a rival, ‘a dark lady’, and did these figures reflect real people and who they areA.L.?

Rowse in his book, “Shakespeare’s Sonnets “(1964) P xviii, says, “The Sonnets begin happily enough, and he made the most of his enforced leisure by writing his two long poems, taking his chance to stake out his claim as a poet”. This is echoed in the National Geographic article on the Folger Library, “his enforced leisure bore fruit in two long narrative poems”. Not only is it implied there that the Sonnets were written in the plague years, in defiance that there is no evidence whatever that he was a member of the Burbadge company or that he ever was even known in London. Rowse continues: “But as the Sonnets go on, they show increasing signs of distress for this among other reasons: sense of insecurity, anxiety, etc. at the blows of fortune, all this is expressed again and again. In order to live he had to recommend himself to a patron.”

The biographers claim that ‘W.S.’ was active in writing plays as early as 1591 and was an actor in the Burbadge company earlier than 1591, yet by 1593, he is begging for a patron in order to live, but by their own reasoning, he should be acting in the same company by travelling to the suburbs. Only established poets were given patronage by the wealthy.

The contention that the young Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, was the youth to whom the Sonnets were addressed is one of the ‘answers’. Yet, ‘The Yale Shakespeare’ (1923) makes no mention of this. The ‘beauteous and lovely youth’ of the first sonnet was still considered to be a mystery at that time. ‘W.S’ dedicated his two ‘long poems’ to Southampton, and there is the legend or Sir William Davenant’s ‘word’ that Southampton gave William 1000 pounds, but was he the youth of the Sonnets ? Rowse concludes that internal and external events place the writing of the Sonnets beginning as early as in the winter of 1591 2 and he believes that Southampton is the youth. Historians agree with Meres that these Sonnets were never intended for publication and were to be seen and read only by ‘intimate friends’ but no one has proven or even indicated who these ‘friends’ might be.

Did Francis Meres know these sonnets, had he read them or did he see a listing of them somewhere ? He would have had to be one of ‘the private ‘friends’ to have read them and he or no one else has suggested that he was a friend. No one has raised the question of Meres’ knowing anything personally about any of these works that he ascribes to William and others. All poems or plays were in published form and had the usual title pages or dedication pages without the name of William. Meres, for all anyone knows, merely copied down titles that he saw at the Stationers office in the churchyards but how did he know about these unpublished sonnets unless he were told that they existed and was told further by whom they were written. He knew of them by hearsay. He may have called them ‘sugared’ also by hearsay. Rowse says (P.xxi):“The various references to plague remind us where we are in these plague years 1592 and 1593, to which Venus and Adonis and Lucrece direct us like two signposts. But there are several references to contemporary events, which knowledge of the time can interpret, that corroborate our dating and make it certain for us. We are not in a position to say, then, that the winters were those of 1591 2, 1592 3, 1593 4, and that this immortal friendship may thus be dated.”

Rowse is expressing his own theories but it is astounding that this foremost ‘W.S.’ biographer is saying that these Sonnets ‘belonged to Southampton’. There is no evidence that Southampton took up the sponsorship of anyone called ‘Shakespeare’ regardless of that name appearing on the Dedication of ‘Venus’ and he never was patron to those other poets who are known to have similarly dedicated poetry to him for the same reason. When a person becomes a patron to one or more poets, the ensuing poetry that each man writes does not ‘belong’ to the patron and any patron is not ‘paying for’ poetry as modern sponsors do not own anything but their own name. If these Sonnets were written about and to Southampton, why would Meres have the idea that they were passed about ‘among his private friends’ and how would Meres know anything about them if they were private ?

The obscurity of many of these poems certainly arises from their being written for friendly eyes, and accordingly they contain many allusions to persons and events that would be known to that contemporary private circle, but would mean nothing to outsiders, even in the 1590’s.

Rowse says that the Sonnets are in the proper order but the Yale Book written by Reed says, “In the Passionate Pilgrim, 1599, were published the first two of Shakespeare’s sonnets to appear in print. They were Nos.139 and 144. Their text differs in several lines from that printed in the first edition of the whole sonnet collection. This first edition was a quarto published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609. It contains a large number of obvious mistakes that ruin the sense; in several cases sonnets that plainly should follow each other are separated; and it is impossible to believe that Shakespeare prepared the text for publications.”

This is impossible to believe as ‘he’ never ‘prepared’ anything for publication. Rowse says, “The Sonnets, as we have them, tell an intelligible story, and any attempt to rearrange them is otiose and absurd. There is only one qualification to this, Sonnets 1 to 126 are written to Southampton and read, without difficulty, continuously. Sonnets 126 to 154, which are mainly concerned with Shakespeare’s mistress, are not later in time: they come within the Southampton sequence, Sonnets 133 and 134 duplicating, from the point of view of the relationship with her, the trouble that is expressed in Sonnets 33 and 34 in his relationship with Southampton. The Southampton sonnets overlap those that concern her, and at both ends, before and after. They were not intended to be shown to her, but to Southampton. The sonnets were his: they belonged to him as the poet’s patron: this was what he was paying for.”

“This gives a terminal date of 1595. It confirms for us that they are in reasonable chronological order, and that any rearranging is out of the question.”

If the patron approved, he or she would accept the poet and be his patron. If the poet did not receive an acceptance, he might try again or apply to another prospective patron. Henry Wriothesley happened to be supposed as an ideal prospect for the poets in the early 1590s. He was now the Third Earl of Southampton as he had been since he was eight, but he was now 17 or 18, not a child but still unmarried in 1591. Although his father had spent time in the Tower, had separated from his wife and had died in 1581, Henry was heir to a tidy sum, a title and the Titchfield mansion. The ‘tidy sum’ made him an ideal target for patronage and the poets included their Dedications. George Peele included in his ‘Honour of the Garter’, the Dedication: “Gentle Wriothesley, Southampton’s star, I will all fortune that in Cynthia’s eye, Cynthia the glory of the western world, With all the stars in her fair firmament Bright may he rise and shine immortally.”

The only ‘certainty’ is that the plague years were 18 months from 1592 to 1594 which is in the history books, and all this speculation does not establish that the author of these ‘Sonnets’, regardless of which words they contain, was patronized by, was a friend of or even had met or knew Henry Wriothesley. It is all worthless speculation to establish that there was a poet called ‘Shakespeare’. If the Sonnets were begun as early as the winter of 1591 2, the Earl would be a youth of 18 in the fall of 1591 and these poems would concern the interest of a man of at least 28 if the youth was young Henry. This sonneteer was ‘still without any financial security’, and ‘in order to live William had to recommend himself to a patron’ and since there is no record of young Henry ever being a patron to anyone, ‘William’ is never claimed to have ‘recommended himself’ to any other possible patron including those who were already patrons. In a very class conscious society of London, who were his friends ? Who or what had he as an asset to use by way of introduction to society ? “There is no doubt that he was well known and a frequent visitor at Court” as the biographers imply, but if he were, there would be ample reference to these occasions, but there is none. Some poets or poet playwrights sought for patronage. Some attained a sponsor by way of direct introduction as Marlowe had gained the patronage of Thomas Walsingham, possibly not with money but with friendship and the hospitality of his house. When a poet had no sponsor, it was a custom to write a long poem or a collection of shorter poems, print them for public sale and, on an inside page, dedicate the poetry to a prospective sponsor. On the dedication page, the prospective sponsor was properly addressed, then flattered profusely along with much self deprecating on the part of the humble and unworthy author. All followed the same pattern. Here were everyday verse writers appealing to a wealthy person of high bearing in a very class conscious society, and whatever was written and however it was stated, the dedication was a sales advertisement without personal contact. Poets did not knock on doors or send letters by messenger. The Dedication could contain flowery, flattering and overly personal expressions by modern standards but be quite the custom of the time. The poetry may be more erotic than would be tolerated in Victorian time but quite acceptable in Elizabethan time.

Nashe received no response and he dropped the dedication from the next edition.

“Long have I desired to approve my wit unto you A dear lover and cherisher you are, As well of the lover of poets as the poets themselves. Your Lordship is the large spreading branch of renown From whence these idle leaves seek to derive Their whole nourishment.”

If Sonnet 86 does refer to Marlowe in these lines, it would also seem to refer to Thorpe’s dedication in the Marlowe book of Lucan that this poet may have seen in 1600 but not back in 1595 or 1594 when these Sonnets are claimed to have been written. The allusion is made in this Sonnet that ‘Marlowe’, if it is he, must be receiving his ability from ‘beyond’ as many today wonder if Mozart, too, received his unprecedented ability beyond normal power to compose music perfectly and to graph it on paper without revision.

‘Shakespeare’ biographer, A. L. Rowse (1963 P162) says, “There is no aristocratic reserve, as there is, for example, with Sir Philip Sidney even in his most intimate expression of his feelings towards Stella. With Shakespeare, there is nothing that he does not tell us about himself, everything is exposed; his humiliations, the indignities he suffers, his fears and apprehensions of the loss of love; the sin he commits in his adulterous relation with his mistress, his remorse and his weakness, his inability to free himself from subjugation.”

Thomas Nash dedicated his “the Unfortunate Traveller’ to Southampton in 1594.

Some biographers have gone so far as to suggest that William thought that Marlowe was vying for Henry’s patronage and that he was jealous of this. This goes further beyond reason than the previous limits as they now invent thoughts for this ‘poet’ reading them into ‘his’ poetry of an even later time ignoring that their man’s name was never heard nor seen in print until after Marlowe had ‘gone’ in May of 1593, but they try to find ‘hints’ among the lines of verse to show that their William was in London and therefore ‘well known’ in 1591. They scanned the Sonnets and ‘found’ a suggestion that Marlowe was seeking Southampton as a patron. Following their ‘logic’, why would this poet write about what Marlowe did before he died and in such a manner that it would take two or three centuries to unravel the enigma in what could have been a lost effort if these lines had not been reprinted in 1870 ? These bits of verse very possibly would never have been revived if the name on them had not been the same as the name on the Plays of 1623.To examine this Marlowe-Shakespeare controversy:Thomas Thorpe published Marlowe’s translation of the first book of Lucan in 1600 and he wrote another of his letters of Dedication, this time to Edward Blount. In it he refers to ‘that pure elemental wit, Chr Marlow’. He said that Marlowe’s “ghost or Genius is to be seene walke the Churchyard in (at the least) three or four sheets. Me thinkes you shoulde presently look wilde now, and grow humourously frantique upon the taste of it. This spirit was sometimes a familiar of your own”. ‘Familiar’ is a pun on magicians’ familiars as was seen in Dr Faustus. A ‘familiar’ was thought to be a ‘spirit’, in animal form usually, serving a witch. Thorpe can see in Marlowe, his intellectual ‘wit’ and perceptive power, not humour. The individual Sonnets that were considered by some to be in reference to Marlowe, are numbers 79, 86 and 87. “Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead. He, nor that affable familiar ghost which nightly Gulls him with intelligence…”

The ‘Dark Lady’ is seen in the Sonnets and of her, Rowse says, “And when we come to the woman, ‘there is nothing like the woman of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in all the sonnet literature of the Renaissance’”, quoting Edward Hubler. The Dark Lady was supposed to be ‘William’s mistress’ back in 1593, when Southampton was 19 years, yet these 26 later verses are considered to be written as late as 1608.

The question still remains: If ‘William’, or whichever author, knew young Henry so well as to be privy to such private matters as to his masculinity or femininity as in, “And for a woman wert thou first created Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a doting, And by addition me of thee defeated, By adding one thing to my purpose nothing, But since she pricked them out for women’s pleasure Mine be thy love, and the love’s use their treasure”, then “persuading the young Man to marry” and then getting “the young peer to write on his behalf to the lady whom the poet is pursuing with whom he is infatuated, and Southampton becomes entangled with her” and then ‘W.S’ suffers, as a result of this, scorn, rejection, falseness, infidelity, reproaches, torment, humiliation, all from the lady, the Dark Lady. Why, if this is the Earl of Southampton, does William go to the bother of publishing’ ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, which he did not, and wait all these agonizing months for a reply, which he never received, writing all those extra words when he need only to have taken this sheaf of paper down to what is now Bloomsbury Square at Southampton Place, knock on the door, and say ‘Wilt thou be my patron?” for which he would be booted down the steps and into the street.

These pages, written over a period of some 16 years, and supposedly ‘passed about among private hands’ before 1598, were not published until 1609 but supposedly were kept together and brought to the printer in the proper order. Was there only one copy or were there copies of the original pages? If Southampton were to have the first 126 verses that were ‘addressed’ to him, why would he have had the other later verses on an entirely different subject, and if Southampton had them as many observers feel that he did, why does Meres say that they were ‘passed though private hands’ ? If it took as long as 16 years to write these sonnets, the larger question that is never asked by these critics is ‘why would Southampton, being the type of wastrel that he is registered as being, bother with any dribbles of sheaf’s of papers that were published when he quite probably never knew they exised ? The biographers seem never to follow through on which actions that would be necessary to fulfill their suppositions. Southampton would need to buy a copy of the printed book even to know they existed and this is most doubtful.

For the generations since 1870, historians have puzzled over the Sonnets and have pointed out parallels in the life of Henry Wriothesley but, again, there is no direct mention of Henry or any distinguishing words of address in the Sonnets to identify him even remotely as being the person to whom the Sonnets are ‘addressed’. It is not known exactly when any particular sonnet was written and ascribed dates can be moved in order to comply with what is ‘definitely’ known about the events in Southampton’s life, but has Southampton that unique a life that similar events in the lives of others could not ‘fit’ the sequence of these Sonnets ? If they were written over a period of several to ten years, some say from 1592 to as late as 1608, are the verses applicable to Southampton over all of these years ? The poems would be on separate pieces of paper and if not conscientiously numbered, these pages could have been shuffled in any order, but some critics say that they were printed in the proper order.

6 Rowse, among other biographers, can perceive the smallest feelings of the author through the sonnet words of this particular author, but which other author has been so mentally dissected in his words that they all imagine as self expressions ? They do not give this poet credit for his ability to create the thoughts of some imaginary character in a poem.

There is no evidence that Southampton was a patron for anyone. There is only the one legend of generosity that few if any historians believe, Sir William Davenant’s statement that “My Lord Southampton at one time gave him a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase which he had a mind to”. Most observers feel that this “would be an impossibly large sum; it is possible that a digit has been added to it”, “an extra naught” say others. The quote is clear, a 1000 pounds for a purchase but it does not say that it was 100 pounds, “about the right sum to purchase a share in the Lord Chamberlain’s company on it formation in 1594” as is so often surmised. It is not stated when the purchase was made. It could just as well have been closer to 1598 when it is very obvious that William of Stratford was investing for the first documented time in property. However, there is no evidence, either, that William of Stratford ever heard, much less knew, of the Earl of Southampton. A.L. Rowse gives the argument that: ‘If’ the Sonnets were in the possession of Southampton and put away in a drawer, then when Henry’s mother died in 1607, her third husband would have access to them. His name was Sir William Harvey who married Cordelia Amesley in the following year, 1608. Thomas Thorpe could have received the Sonnets from Sir William ‘if’ he is the ‘Mr W.H.’. The ‘Mr’ in ‘Mr W.H.’, pronounced as ‘Master’, is the correct and proper use of the address for a knight. This explanation for the identity of ‘W.H.’ seems plausible only if it is assumed that the ‘Sonnets’ were in the possession of Henry Wriothesley, but this assumption is only an extension of the supposition that the youth in the ‘Sonnets’ is actually Henry, for which there is no evidence. Henry was 17 or 18 in 1591, the supposed year in which the beginning verses were written. The poem refers to events or a relationship before that time when Henry was 16. No one had heard the name of ‘W.S.’ until the fall of 1593 upon the publication of ‘Venus’. In 1590 or 1591, how would the unaccomplished, unknown 26 year old ‘William’ gain introduction to a highly protected 16 year old Earl of Southampton ? Again, assuming that he had an introduction, why would a Dedication in search of patronage be necessary in 1593 ? Even assuming that the ‘youth’ in the Sonnets was Southampton, it would not follow that the papers on which the ‘Sonnets were written would be, therefore, in Southampton’s possession. Of what happened to the Sonnets once they were published, Reed of the Yale Book says: “This first quarto made no such impression as did Sidney’s posthumous sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella, published in 1591, and it was not until 1640 that a second edition of ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ appeared. This was published by John Benson under the title, ‘Poems written by Wil. Shake speare, Gent’; yet it contained, as well, poems by Marlowe, Raleigh, Ben Jonson, Carew, Herrick, Milton and others. The sonnets were not printed in the order that they appeared in the quarto of 1609. In many cases they were run together as one continuous poem; and there were added to them, singly or in groups, seventy four titles, some fairly appropriate, others quite unfitting, and nearly all commonplace. Seven sonnets, including No. 18, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ and the poem in couplets, No. 126, are omitted from this edition. Plainly it is much inferior to the quarto of 1609. In 1710 both the first and second editions were reprinted. Two editions in the century indicated a lack of interest in the sonnets, especially when their fate is contrasted with the numerous editions and great popularity of many of the plays.”

The work is labelled as ‘curiously uneven’. Some sonnets are considered ‘god given’ lines, sheer inspired lines, the most memorable that the author ever wrote. Often the purest poetry is claimed to come in the first four lines, those of Sonnets 29 and 30 for examples: ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’ and ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought’.

It seems convenient to propose the theory that since Southampton’s mother dies in 1607, his stepfather re marries in 1608, and thereby has possession of the ‘Sonnets’ to give to the printer in 1609. The premise is contrived to find William Harvey as the begetter, ‘W.H.’, but completely ignores the other premise for the same theory, that Southampton would still be the possessor, not his stepfather, and Southampton lived until 1624 when he died of a ‘burning fever’ at Beren op Zoom. Each writer of this portion of the William Story takes a separate turn, each gives a different set of dates for the Sonnets, 1595 to 1605, or 1591 to 1608, and each adds yet another small detail that infers an opposing conclusion.

Robert Payne in his ‘By Me, William Shakespeare’, 1980, says of the Sonnets’ printing, “They are evidently printed from Shakespeare’s manuscript, and it is possible and even probable that he read the proofs carefully, for the text is remarkably clean. The printer’s errors, when they occur, are precisely the kind of calamitous errors that occur when an author corrects his own work at the last moment.”

There is further evidence of the manner in which the first editions of ‘Shakespeare’ neglected these poems. To cite Lee, “Neither Nicholas Rowe, nor Pope, nor Theobald, nor Hanmer, nor Warburton, nor Capell, nor Dr Johnson included them in their respective collections of Shakespeare’s plays. None of these editors, save Capell, showed any signs of acquaintance with them.Thefirst critical edition of the sonnets was Malone’s, 1780, for which George Steevens supplied some material; and it is indicative of the general attitude towards the sonnets that Steevens himself, in 1798, wrote that “The strongest act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service” to even glance sideways at the words.

If ‘William’ is the proof reader, why would it be necessary for ‘W.H.’ to be the ‘begetter’ for Thomas Thorpe ? If it is ‘even probable’ that William ‘read the proofs carefully’, why are there ‘calamitous errors’ that ‘occur when an author’, seemingly any author, ‘corrects his own work’, as when else would he proof read except ‘at the last moment’ when the first proofs come off the press ? Since Payne says that William ‘read the proofs carefully’ because ‘the text is remarkably clean’, why are their ‘printer’s errors’, because if there are printer’s errors, William could not have ‘read the proofs’ as proofs are read in order to correct any errors. If Payne means by ‘corrects his own work’ that it is the original manuscript, then, William is not ‘proof reading’ and if it is his manuscript, why does Payne assume that it is ‘at the last moment’ and whether it is corrected at the last moment or at leisure months before, it is presented to the printer seemingly without errors. If there are errors due to a messy script because it is corrected ‘at the last moment’ thereby causing ‘the kind of calamitous errors that occur’ after ‘last moment corrections’, William is supposed to be ‘proof reading’ to correct the printer’s errors so why are there ‘errors’ ?

This would be the only instance when William is imagined to be a proof reader or to have any part in printing ‘his own work’ All other ‘pirated’ Quartos have been claimed as being ‘stolen’ and ‘maimed’ by ‘calamitous printer’s errors’ and this signifies that no one did any proof reading. Payne also says that the Sonnets “include some of the worst sonnets ever written in the English language. About fifty of them show Shakespeare at the height of his powers, and another fifty pass muster, while the rest are second and third rate”.

Not so the Sonnets, however, two thirds of which are not at all remarkable and these are overlooked entirely by most of the commentators of the middle centuries including Dr Johnson. Since some of these sonnets are ‘dated’ as early as 1591, some of the inspired lines were written long before ‘the first heir of my invention’, ‘Venus and Adonis’.

Seekers for the identity of ‘W. H.’ had only to refer to another publication of Thorpe’s.

Three years earlier, in 1606 he had published a collection of poetry, ‘A Fourefold Meditation’ by Robert Southwell, who, on February 21, 1595, was hanged at Tyburn for ‘treason’ that meant for being a Catholic priest. The Dedication read: “To the Right Worshipful and Vertuous Gentleman, Mathew Saunders, Esquire. W.H. wisheth, with long life, a prosperous achievement of his good desires.” No one spent any time in searching out Robert Southwell’s ‘mysterious’ ‘W. H.’ or inventing any relationship to Mathew Saunders as searchers were too interested in grasping the opportunity to fill in another blank page in William’s ‘life’.

The Sonnets, other than their publication in 1609, the inclusion of two of the Sonnets in the 1599 collection of poems, ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’, and the mention of the ‘sugared sonnets’ by Francis Meres in 1598, were never referred to in print or writing by anyone in William of Stratford’s lifetime.

Some with a masterful four ‘beginning lines’ appear to be finished by a far lesser hand, yet no one suggests that someone else wrote these lesser lines as they do in assessing the authorship of some of the early plays credited to William. In those, the best lines are attributed to William, the lesser to Marlowe or Greene or ‘someone else’.

Sir Sidney Lee ‘found’ that William Hall who as printer was employed by Thorpe to find or procure manuscripts, and that Hall was an agent between William and Thorpe. Another fine supposition ! Here is the ‘real’ ‘W.H.’ whose identity is hidden cryptically in the third line of the printed dedication, ‘Mr W.H. All Happiness’. This is presented as if William cared to publish the Sonnets and nothing else ever again, but needed a ‘procurer’ to act as a go between to the publisher, Thomas Thorpe. Now this would present William holding possession of the original manuscripts but needing someone else to take them to the print shop, and instead of dedicating them to someone himself, permits the publisher to dedicate them to the go between ! This is based on the supposition that William ‘set out finding a publisher’. Why would anyone have to ‘find’ a publisher in London and how would he ‘find’ this William Hall, who is a printer himself, more easily than going directly to the famous Thomas Thorpe who attended the same Free School at Stratford as did William Shaxper, and who had published many other works including translations of Epictetus and Saint August ? He had become a freeman of the Stationers Company in 1594 and would publish words of Ben Jonson and three plays of George Chapman. This is an example of the ‘reasoning’ or imagination of one biographer basing his argument on the opposite of the basis of another critic. Here Sir Sidney Lee has William asking a printer to act as a ‘finder’ of the sonnet manuscripts while another author, Robert Payne, claims that William had them in his possession ‘correcting them at the last moment’ while still another, A. L. Rowse, claims that the sonnets were ‘in a drawer’ belonging to the Earl of Southampton as ‘he paid for them’. All of these conclusions began in the search for the identity of ‘W. H.’, the only positive information as these initials are printed on the publication.

The title page of the Sonnets states that the printer was ‘G. Eld’ and Eld had a print shop in London, and the book was ‘to be solde by John Wright’ who can be found ‘dwelling at Christ Church gate’. The only positive in this printing is that not Thorpe or Eld or Wright or anyone else received any manuscript from ‘William’. The ‘W.H.’ to whom Thorpe dedicated the edition of the book was a person whom Thorpe knew but of whom no one today knows the identity.

The Two Marlowes of the Sonnets, The Old [M]arlowe and The New [A]uthor [71 72] [M] 71 No longer mourn for me when I am dead. After my death, dear, love, forget me quite, 73 For you in me can nothing worthy prove’ Unless you would devise some virtuous lie. [A] 73 - In me thou see’st the twilight of such day. In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire, That on the ashes of his youth doth lie. [M] 74 But be contented; when that fell arrest Without all bail shall carry me away,

In Sonnets 71 to 90, the voice of the Old and the New identities are speaking to each other. The Old is heard speaking in Sonnets 71, 72, 74, 77, 82, 83, 85 and 88. The New identity is heard in all of the others from 73 to 90. In Sonnets 79, 80 and 81 the New identity speaks about itself in the third person, the writer’s pen or verse, recognizing that the New Creative Self is really apart from it, that the Muse has become a totally separate entity, neither fully the Old nor the New. Sonnet 87 is seen by some to refer to Marlowe’s ‘death’, to others his ‘escape’.

The book contains many verses known not to be of that name and at a time when later scholars claim that the name, if not the man, was ‘at the height of his fame’.

Sonnets 71 to 90 may be taken, not as Marlowe as an influence on the ‘Author’, as the critics imply, but as the actual author of the sonnets, with Marlowe giving the new identity, ‘W.S.’, his permission for this new name to take full credit for ‘passing off’ Marlowe’s future works as his own inventions. It can be read as the new name admitting that only by Marlowe’s ‘granting’ does the name ‘hold’ Marlowe’s work and, but for their ‘riches’ and his ‘great gift’, where is the name ‘deserving’ ?

The word ‘William’, implied in ‘Shakespeares Sonnets’, the title on the cover, never appears on the title page, on the Dedication page or anywhere in the book. So who claimed that these sonnets were written by ‘Shakespeare’ ? Thomas Thorpe took the material to the printer, G. Eld, and prepared the Dedication in which he is more interested in wishing ‘W. H.’ ‘All Happiness’ than mentioning the word ‘William; or even ‘Wllm’ or ‘Wm’.

The Sonnet may be an interpreted as a conversation between the two Christopher Marlowes, the one being the true ‘identity’ that must with all its imperfections ‘end’ and never again receive the adulation for the continuing verse that will flow from the New Identity that cannot ever be associated with the Old, never to have revealed the relation of their separate identities.Inthe poetic sense, there are two Poets, two distinct Muses, one perhaps borrowing at times from the former self, but endeavouring to be a New and separate Muse While the Old may hold every wish for the New self, is the Old Muse jealous of the New, still wishing to be remembered for being the true Self ? In the ‘Sonnets’, these two identities try to perceive the emotions bound up in the other’s state of mind, each striving to apprehend the other’s feelings. The New still continues to fulfill the aspirations and dreams of the Other knowing that it owes its success and its very being to the former identity while the Old, though wishing all success to the New Identity, knows that it must come to terms with what fate has wrought for it, that the adulation of the Word that is rightfully due to the Former Self will be forever relinquished to the New. This is the ultimate culmination of a true and perfect love. This is the Voice of Love, one Self with another similar but still different Self, each unfulfilled without the other, each in a single quest to empathize with the other. One self struggles with its outcast state while the Other struggles with its guilt of obligation until each finds gratitude to the other Self.

My life hath in this line some interest, Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.

[A] 75 - So are you to my thoughts as food of life Or as sweet season’d showers are to the ground.

Even this ‘Lady’ is able to ‘publish a volume of verse’ with no mystery of where to ‘find a publisher’ during the same time in the same City of London with no hesitance and with no ‘last moment’ corrections and with no need for someone to procure manuscripts.

76 Why is my verse so barren of new pride ? Marlowe wrote one play, ‘Edward II’ for the Second Earl of Pembroke’s Men in 1592. The countess of Pembroke was Mary Sidney, sister of Sir Philip Sidney and her son, the future Earl of Pembroke, was William Herbert, not the ‘W.H.’ as he was 12 years old in 1592. Thomas Watson was killed in September of that year. Fellow poets Nashe, Peele, Spenser and Lodge sang Watson’s praises in verse at his funeral. Marlowe, when he returned from Canterbury, took Watson’s new Latin poem, ‘Amyntae Gaudia’ to be printed and dedicated it to Lady Sidney. Fraunce, who translated Watson’s ‘Amyntas’ that was written in Latin, passed it off as his own poetry.“The

Emilia Bassano Lanier was more than ambitious. She was exceptional as well as being musical. She was everything described of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets as she played the virginal, treated men cavalierly, was temperamental, inconstant, promiscuous, and had great powers of seduction. The ‘Sonnets’ were published in 1609 and two years later, Emilia published a volume of verse of her own. As a female poet who was second only to the Countess of Pembroke, the sister of Philip Sidney. The volume of verse is titled ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’. Most the verses or poems in the book are addressed to countesses including Susan, Dowager Countess of Kent: “Come, you that were the mistress of my youth, The noble guide of my ungoverned days, avoid the bait of worldly pleasures, living always free from sword, from violence, and from ill report.”

Dark Lady of the Sonnets’ also raised curiosity as to whether she represented a real person of the time. Lord Hunsdon, Henry Carey, was the Lord Chamberlain of the Queen and was her favourite cousin. Around 1587, he took as his mistress Emilia Bassano, the 18 year old daughter of Baptista Bassano, a Queen’s musician. Emilia, too, was musical. She was also the occasional mistress of other Lords of the Court, and in 1592, being pregnant, she was married off to Alphonso Lanier, another of the Queen’s musicians, and who, in 1597, served with the Earl of Southampton in the Azores and in 1599 served with him again under Essex in Ireland. After the marriage, Emilia complained of being abandoned by Lanier and that he spent her annual income of 40 pounds and her jewels that she received from Lord Hunsdon after whom she named her newborn son, Henry. She soon began to look elsewhere. One of the men whom she teased and tormented, then distrusted and discarded was Southampton. There is an account of her from Simon Forman who also experienced her maddening behaviour. He described her ‘high minded’ manner, her ambition to become a Lady of Title that he felt neither she nor her husband deserved. Finally, he became wary of her with her dangerous tales of conjuring with spirits. In 1592, Emilia was 23, and Southampton was 19. Some scholars have seen this threesome situation evident in ‘Loues Labore Lost’ and the dark side of its guilt in ‘Lucrece’.Thename ‘Emilia’ is the name of Iago’s wife in ‘Othello’ and ‘Bassano’ is in the name of ‘Bassanio’ who is the friend of Antonio, the ‘Merchant of Venice’.

That the author of ‘The Sonnets’ is writing about himself, whoever he is, or about actual people that he knows is only speculation. The implication invented here that the Sonnets could be about Marlowe or written by Marlowe, however possible that may be, is a demonstration that almost anything can be imagined and given reason by delving into these verses. Of any of the poems of Sir Philip Sidney or Edmund Spenser, who would have bothered to read so much into them ? There are unanswered questions, not about ‘William’ but about those referring to him.

This biographer continues to inform that “no biographer of Shakespeare seems to have averred to the period of time which it was likely that the gift was made, in combination with the nature of the purchase Lord Southampton had heard our great dramatist wished to complete”. It is not known when such a gift was supposed to have been made but the time is essential.

Several poets had dedicated poems to Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton seeking patronage. It is assumed that ‘W. S.’ also did this in the Dedication to ‘Venus and Adonis’ but there is no instance of record of Henry accepting this or any other application for a patron. In 1701, the biographer Rowe published his ‘Life of Shakespeare’ that was instrumental in beginning the ‘Shakespeare Cult’ later in the 19th and 20th centuries. Rowe relates that an anecdote was handed down that he considered ‘authentic’ because it was originally stated by Sir William Davenant, the Poet Laureate, in the 1660s, and he was “contemporary at least with Shakespeare’s contemporaries”. Rowe gives the statement: “There is one instance so singular in the munificence of this patron of Shakespeare’s that, if I had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir William Davenport, who probably very well acquainted with his [Shakespeare’s] affairs, I should not have ventured to have it inserted; that my Lord Southampton at one time gave him a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to, a bounty very great, and very rare at any time.”Rowe’s statement convinces the writer of the ‘Life of William Shakespeare’ in the ‘Complete Shakespeare’, Books, Inc. 1939, who is unnamed, that this must have occurred after the publication of ‘Venus and Adonis’ of 1593, when, in December of that year, Richard Burbadge had signed a carpenter’s bond for the construction of the Globe Theatre. The inference is that Shakespeare would invest the thousand pounds in the Globe. This, again, is an assumption that is always made looking backwards that he was interested solely with playwriting, acting and theatre buildings. William of Stratford had no shares in any theatre building as he was never known to have sold anything in property or possessions. ‘A purchase that he had a mind to’ sounds more literally of an outright purchase of real estate of which it is documented that William of Stratford did buy and someone has confused this in a desire to have this sum come from Southampton thereby linking William of Stratford with the Dedication in ‘Venus’.

In February 1601, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, planned to seize the Queen in the Royal Court and to force her to change her government. Essex had called upon all of his followers into London and, on February 3rd, the leaders met in Southampton’s lodgings at Drury House to plan their exact moves. They were to surprise the Court, with the two Earls to go through the Privy Chamber into the Queen’s presence. Southampton, when the others drew back at the idea, then encouraged Essex on and asked, ‘shall we resolve upon nothing then ?’

SOUTHAMPTON Robert J. Meyer

Four days later, the conspirators arranged a performance of ‘Richard II ‘at the Globe. Actor Augustine Philips testified later that Sir Charles Percy, Sir Jocelyn Percy and the Lord Monteagle and others spoke to the players to have the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard II to be played, promising to give them 40 shillings more than their ordinary price to play it. After first complaining that the play was too old for them to do it justice on short notice, they agreed to perform it on the Saturday. However, that evening, the Council summoned Essex into its presence. The next day, Essex broke out into the City expecting to raise a large following by his popularity. The attempt failed. Inside Essex House a Welsh Captain was killed along with a footman of Southampton. He and Essex were tried for treason and both were condemned to death.

In 1585, Philip of Spain besieged Antwerp where he would command 60 miles of coastline to invade England. Elizabeth sent a meagre force that was too little and too late, led by her Earl of Leicester, his 36- year-old nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, known as the ‘miracle of the age’ as a poet, and Leicester’s 20 year old stepson, the Earl of Essex, as his General of the Horse. Both Leicester and Essex were pleasure loving and slow, Essex being more interested in jousting tournaments while Sir Philip Sidney fretted over their dalliance and so went into battle himself only to be mortally wounded

The Earls of Southampton, Sussex, Bedford and Rutland followed Essex in his February 8th 1601 revolt, all of whom had lived extravagantly, all had their estates highly mortgaged and Rutland had wasted 12,400 pounds of inheritance. In their unfortunate tactics they all had lost to gain higher places at Court through Essex’ grasp for the Crown.

Henry Wriothesley had promised to marry the granddaughter of Lord Burlegh who had seen that he was educated at Cambridge when the boy’s father died. Henry broke his promise and fell out of favour and fell financially. His mother married Vice Chamberlain, Sir Thomas Henage in May of 1594 when he, too, was out of favour.

Henry Wriothesley was born at Condray House in Sussex on October 6, 1573. His grandfather acquired great wealth from the dissolution of the monasteries, and the abbeys of Titchfield and Beaulier in Hampshire. His mother was Mary Brown, the daughter of the first Viscount Montague. In 1581, Henry became the Third Earl of Southampton after the deaths of his elder brother and of his father when Henry was eight. At twelve, he was sent to St John’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated M.A. in 1589 when he entered his name at Gray’s Inn. He appointed as his tutor in Italian, John Florio, the translator of the ‘Essays of Montaigne’.

Now it is found that Southampton played Primero with Walter Ralegh in 1598, which seems to conflict with the relationship between the two men that is constantly brought forward by biographers that divides Ralegh and Southampton into separate political camps as enemies, as in the reason given by some for the supposed parodies ‘written’ into the characters of ‘Loves Labore Lost’ who they claim represent Ralegh and others in 1592.

Southampton’s mother and his wife both wrote appeals to Secretary of State, Robert Cecil pleading for Henry’s life. His life was spared but he remained in the Towner until February 25th, 1601 when he was beheaded.

Southampton came to Court in 1590 at the age of seventeen. He had a wild temper at this time, forever getting into brawls and he could not be tamed even five years later by his stepfather, the Vice Chamberlain. Early in 1598, Southampton was playing Primero late one night with Ambrose Willoughby, a squire, along with Walter Ralegh when Willoughby suggested that it was time to end the game and to retire. Ralegh concurred with it. Southampton became belligerent and later, out near the tennis court, struck Willoughby who reacted by grabbing a few of Southampton’s ‘golden tresses’ and ‘pulled out one of his locks’. The Queen, when she heard of this, congratulated Willoughby and allowed Southampton to sail for France, but soon she learned of Southampton’s dalliance with Elizabeth Vernon, a maid of honour. At the Queen’s bidding, the Earl returned, married the pregnant maid of honour but secretly, and then returned to Paris. The Queen promptly ordered him back, placed him in custody, and sent the new Countess to Fleet Prison. Thus was Southampton’s career ended at the age of twentyfive.

On February 19th Essex and Southampton went on trial, Rutland and others having confessed. Walter Ralegh gave witness to what his kinsman, Sir Fernando Gorges, had said that Sunday morning of February 8th when Ralegh tried to persuade him to abandon his part in the revolt. Gorges told Ralegh, “You are like to have a bloody day of it”.

The Dedication to Southampton in ‘Venus and Adonis’ has given later biographers the only meagre excuse to invent a long list of unsubstantiated relationships, a patronage, a friendship before 1593, and even a ‘love affair’ that is supposed to be recited in the ‘Sonnets’ leading to Southampton’s ‘ownership’ of the manuscripts of the Sonnets, leading to his stepfather’s passing them on to Thomas Thorpe for publishing, all of which was surmised two centuries after William’s lifetime. No one had hinted at any such relationships between Southampton and any of the other Elizabethan poets known to have dedicated poetry to Southampton about the same time. There is nothing about the man’s character, an obstreperous youth of 17 and a scheming spendthrift of later years that would have attracted any of the poets. Many of the poets had spent time in prison, Jonson, Marlowe, Tom Watson, but not `William Shaxper. Living in Stratford was dangerous. On the first day of May Fair 1602, Sir Edward Greville entered the town to ‘seize the toll corn’. After drinking, men began a brawl that the Bailiff, Richard Quiney, tried to quell but he was hit on the head by one of his own officers and he died four weeks later from the wound… but not William Shaxper.

Southampton was quick to be a follower of Essex as Essex was very popular with the townspeople, even in Stratford where they would say, “If our good Lord Essex were here, he’d make short work of these malt hoarders”. Essex was known to desire the throne for himself and Southampton constantly urged him on to take command and was so bold as to say to him that he had more lineal right to the throne than Elizabeth. When the Queen sent Essex to Ireland to quell the revolt of Tyrone, she would not give Southampton authority in her command but he went to Ireland anyway and Essex made him his General of the Horse

There is no evidence that Southampton was a ‘partner’ of anyone. Although he had begun with a fortune, he and his fellow followers of Essex were mortgaged to the utmost, by the late 1590s. William of Stratford had no increase in his fortunes before 1597 when Southampton’s fortune was in decline and there is no evidence that William ever knew the man. The biographers and commentators in print since 1870, in inventing this ‘relationship’, have overlooked reading or researching the life of Southampton.

‘William Shakespeare’ was never known to have written a translation from Latin, a facility that was the routine exercise of poets of the Elizabethan Age. The Plays are the most highly praised in the English language for they have the unmistakeable stamp of one who understood the mind of both the King and the Commoner. The Author entered the mind of the merchant or the murderer with equal empathy. This Author is praised most for his insight into the human condition as if he had a natural gift as the effortless ability to wiggle one’s ears or a ’double jointed’ thumb. The Plays were not the result of effortlessness. It was the ability developed from being an interested man, and inquiring man, a daring man. From the documented activities and the testimony of his friends and business associates, William Shaxper of Stratford was none of these.

The spelling of Shakespeare’s name is from the ‘Life of William Shakespeare’ ‘the complete works, Books Inc. 1939.

The surety bond (1582) ‘Shagspere’ Load of stone sale (1598) ‘Shaxpere’

In the printings of those Quartos that gave credit to ‘William Shake speare’ as the author there were but nineteen during the lifetime of William of Stratford, two long poems, ‘Venus’ and ‘Lucrece’, two books of poetry, the ‘Sonnets’ and ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’, and fifteen plays in Quarto.The surname in each instance was spelled with the full eleven letter ‘Shake speare’ or with either of two slight variants with the omission of either the first ‘e’ or the final ‘e’ but never with the omission of both. All of the spellings on all of the publications or in any reference to that name on the title pages of those books, all of the spellings are one of these three similar spellings, ‘Shakespeare’, ‘Shakspeare’ or ‘Shakespear’. Of the Quarto plays only ‘King Lear’ omits the first ‘e’. That the great percentage of references to these printings during the 17th century is of the two Folios and a book of poems in 1640, were the only reference for the uniform eleven letter spelling with only some dropping the final ‘e’ as the custom of dropping more final ‘e’s was growing. There were no other variations generally.

These spellings are influenced by the sound of the first syllable being pronounced as ‘Shax’ or ‘Shacks’, and the second syllable as ‘per’ or ‘purr’ while the spelling on the plays and poems induces the ‘s’ sound to be carried over to the ‘pere’ to be pronounced ‘speer’. Since at the time the spelling indicated the sound of the word, these consistencies seem to separate the plays and poems from the Man from Stratford.

In those documents that refer to the Stratford William or in any letter that refers to him during his lifetime, the spellings of the surname are combinations of ‘Shax’ ‘Shaks’, ‘Shacks’ or ‘Shags’ with ‘pere, ‘peer’ or ‘pere’. The first syllable is without and ‘e’ and the second without an ‘a’. These documents range in time from his birth in 1564 to 1616. The marriage licence (1582) ‘Shaxpere’, the entry is in Latin.

THE SPELLING OF THE NAME Robert J. Meyer

Ralph Husband (1606) ‘Shakespre’

Quiney’s letter (1598) ‘Shackespere’

Whittington Will (1601) ‘Shaxspere’ Replingham attorney (1614) ‘Shackespere’

“It has been seen from the foregoing that during the poet’s lifetime, the family name was spelled in a dozen different ways. At that period no importance whatever was attached to the uniform spelling of surnames. A typical instance of this is a letter in the archives of Dulwich College, signed by the poets Massinger, Danborne and Field and addressed to P. Hinchlowe (Henslowe). It is endorsed, “Recd. by me R. Davison of Mr. Hinchloe for the use of Mr. Danborne, Mr. Feeld, Mr. Messenger the sum of five L.”

The number of different spellings to the name ‘Shakespeare’ is often mentioned in biographies, as many as seventy or more variations have been listed., but these are only possibilities and even during the that time when spelling was influenced by the sound of the word, the variations to the ancient name of ‘Shakespeare’ that are found in documents are comparatively few. A number of families in the 16th century had the name ‘Shakestaffe’ but families of ‘Shakespeare’, however spelled, were quite separate from the families of ‘Shakestaffes’, however spelled, and the two were never confused.

Stratford “Mr Shaxpere” sold a load of stone 1598. Will of Thos. Whittington 25 March 1601 “Anne Shaxpere wife unto Wyllyam Shaxpere”

The family name of William of Stratford is uniformly spelled for pronunciation and sound of ‘Shax’, Shacks’ but not of ‘Shake-s’. The ‘s’ sound belongs to the first syllable and not to the second. The official documents written by others have a conformity.

Baptism of William Shaksper Baptism of the twins “ Baptism of Susanna “ William’s Marriage Licence Shaxpere Surety Bond Shagspere Son Hamnet’s Burial “ Susanna’s Marriage Lic “ William’s Burial “

Marriage Licence Bishop of Worcester’s Register 27 November 1582 “Item inter eodem die similes emanavit licencia inter Wm Shaxpere et Annam Whateley de Temple Grafton”. On the same day a similar licence was issued between Wm Shaxpere and Anna Whateley of Temple Grafton.

Marriage Bond Diocesan Registry, Worcester 28 November 1582 In Latin, “The condicion of this obligacion ys suche that if hereafter there shall not appere any Lawful Lett or impediment …but that William Shagspere…and Anne Hathwey of Stratford…maiden may lawfully solemnize matrimony together…then the said obligacion to be voyd…”

As all Shakespeare book prefaces and biographies wish to continue the belief that the Stratford William was the author of the Plays, this editor sloughs off any differences of spelling as inconsequential with misleading ‘evidence’ and outright falsehood. There was ‘importance’ of the spelling but only to represent the ‘sound’ of the name. The family name was not spelled in ‘a dozen different ways’ on documents and by people who knew ‘Shaxper’ families. The ‘typical instance’ cited for ‘no importance’ is misleading as the author does not include the spellings in the signatures of the poets but those in the official endorsement with the incorrect spellings by someone who does not see the difference in sound between ‘Henslowe’ and ‘Hinchloe’. The ‘Hinchlowe’ is written by another person who addressed the letter.

Baptism of Susanna - Holy Temple Church Register - 26 May 1583 - “Susanna daughter to WilliamBaptismShakspere”ofTwins

Baptism Stratford Parish Register 26 April, 1564 “William, son of John Shakspere..”

Holy Trinity Church Register 2 February 1585 “Hamnet & Judith, sonne & daughter to William Shakspere” Burial of Hamnet Holy Trinity Church Register 11 August 1596 “Hamnet, filliam WilliamGrantShaxspere”ofArms 1596 “John Shakespere”

Petition Court of Queen’s Bench Rolls November 1596 “Will(elmus) Wayte pet(it) secure(itates) pacis v(ersus) Will(elm)um Shakspere” Quiney’s Letter 25 October 1598 “To my Loveynge good friend and countryman Mr Wm Shackespere”CorporationEntry

The man, who after 1623, is hailed as the ‘greatest dramatist’ is listed simply as “Will ShaksThepere”first printings of ‘Venus’ and of ‘Lucrece’ in 1593 and 1594 both contained the 11 letter spelling of the name under the Dedication which was supposedly written by the author, yet William of Stratford never signed his own signature in the 11-letter spelling and in all documents and personal references to William, the name was consistently not in the 11 letter spelling. Venus and Lucrece were the first two instances of the name ever being known in London and these were the only instances for four years until 1598. In all the Quartos and books of poems, the name was given the 11 letter spelling except the first ‘Loues Labore Lost (1598) stating “newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere”.

Lease of property witnessed by signature 1610 “Gilbart Shakesper”

Marriage Licence “1616 February 10, M. Tho Queeney to Judith Shakspere”

Diary note Thomas Greene 17 November 1614 “at my Cozen Shakspeare coming yesterday to town.”

Surety for William Sampson 1597 “Gilbert Shackspere”

Malt inventory February 1597 “Wm Shackespere in Chapel Street ward”, ten quarters of malt.

Diary note Thomas Greene September 1615 “Wm Shakspeares tellyng J Greene that I was not able to beare encloseinge of Welcome.”

3 Conveyance Old Stratford Estate 1 May 1602 “This indenture…Betweene William Combe of Warwicke…Esquier, and John Combe of Old Stretford…gentlemen, on the one partie, and William Shakespere of Stretford Vppon Avon…gentleman” Inventory of Ralph Hubard - 31 January 1606 - L20 “Owing by Mr Shakespre” Marriage - Holy Trinity Registry - 5 June 1607 - “Mr John Hall gentleman and Susanna Shaxpere.”Burial St Giles Church Register 12 August 1607 “Edward, son of Edward Shackspeere, player, base born” Burial St Saviour’s Church Entry No. 1 31 December 1607 “Edmund Shakespeare a player in the Church” Entry No. 2 “Edmond Shakspeare a player in the Church with a forenoon knell of the great Bell xx” Burial St Clement Danes 8 August 1609 “Jane Shackespeer daughter of William” Blackfriars Gatehouse Conveyance and Mortgage 10 March 1613 “William Shakespeare of Stratford vpon Avon” William Replingham attorney promoting enclosure Agreement 27 Oct 1614 “to satisfy content and make recompense unto him the said William Shackespeare” This Replingham document mentions in the text one “made betweene William Shackespeare” and an endorsement on verso “Coppy of the articles with Mr Shakspeare” in script. The document is signed by four witnesses and witnesses do not sign copies.

Burial Stratford Parish Register April 25 1616 “Will Shakspere gent”

Therefore, any text referring to his owning shares in the Globe theatre, the Swan theatre or the Blackfriars theatre is an incorrect reference and any document stating this is a proven forgery. They are not mentioned in his will and there is no record of Susanna having any legal involvement with them as there is with the Blackfriars Gatehouse which she inherited. Actor Thomas Pope left his theatre shares to actors John Edmonds and Robert Gough when he died in 1604.

References made after the year 1630 Lt. Hamond 1634 “Neat monument of that famous English poet Mr William Shakespeere who was born here…”

Wm Hall, rector of Acton 1694 to visit “the ashes of the great Shakespear..”

Each man spelled William of Stratford’s name differently and neither was correct, although both wrote after visiting the Church at Stratford and they must have been familiar with the spelling on the Folios that were sold.

The deed for the Blackfriars Gatehouse of 1613 has the name John Heminges as a witness but this does not link William as an associate in the theatre any more that it links William as an associate of John Johnson in the tavern business as the owner of the Tavern was a witness to the mortgage for the Blackfriar’s Gatehouse March 11, 1613. Witnesses are not necessarily drawn from business associates.

Everything that William of Stratford owned in deeds and shares is mentioned in his will as he sold nothing that he ever owned. He bought the ‘Blackfriars Gatehouse’ the deed of which Heminges signed but William mortgaged the property the following day.

The 11 letter spelling is consistent with all but two of the printing of the plays in Quarto and the poems printed until 1623 an all the Folios since. Throughout the lifetime of William of Stratford, he and members of his family have been named in documents and referred to in letters in variations of ‘Shax’ or ‘Shacks’ and usually with ‘peere’ or ‘pere’ endings without the hard ‘A’ spellings.Ofallpeople in London, John Heminges would know William of Stratford in signing his deed in 1613 whether or not he knew who was the author of the Plays in the Folio of 1623. Heminges would not have had his name printed as ‘Heminge’ if he had consented to his name being placed in the Folio and this would confirm that he and Condell did not write ‘the Dedication’ or “To the Great Variety of Readers’ for the Folio. They first appeared in the 1632 Folio when both men were dead but both were alive at the time of the First Folio in 1623.

THE EDMUND SPENSER STANZAS 1591 Robert J. Meyer

There is no reason for assuming that he co-authored plays, made revisions, or up-dated revivals. If he had made alterations on older plays, the general public would never know of this. Credits for such were never stated so the public would not be aware of the authorship of any particular insertions. No great reputation could be gained from revisions. No credit was forthcoming when the author’s name was not printed on the Quartos. ‘Augmented by’ was the first such credit and this was years after Spenser’s ‘Tears’. This second reason hangs upon the unfounded conjecture that William ‘may’ have created a considerable amount of writing all of which is conveniently ‘lost’. Which Elizabethan poet-playwright would not have had immense praise and popularity from all his ‘lost’ plays ? Yet, no biographer bothers to praise similarly any of the ‘contemporaries’. There is nothing recorded to have been written by William but that has no surviving copy as there is with Thomas Kyd’s lost ‘Hamlet’.

The earliest allusion to William as a dramatist was claimed only in the 19th century to be in Edmund Spenser’s ‘Tears of the Muses’ 1591. The particular lines are: “And he the Man, whom Nature selfe had made To mocke her selfe, and Truth to imitate, With Kindly counter under Mimick shade, Our pleasant Willy, ah! is dead of late: With whom all joy and jolly meriment Is also deaded, and in dolor drent.”

“Although we feel assured that he had not composed any of his greatest works before 1591, he may have done much, besides what has come down to us, amply warrant Spenser in applauding him beyond all his theatrical contemporaries. We are persuaded that Shakespeare, early in his theatrical life, must have written much, in the way of revivals, alterations, or joint productions with other poets, which has been forever lost.”

“That if in 1591 he had only brought out ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona’ and ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’, they are so infinitely superior to the best works of his predecessors, that the justice of the tribute paid by Spenser to his genius would at once be admitted.”

The reasons forwarded by the biographer that these lines refer to William:“That more than a year before the publication of these lines, Shakespeare had risen to be a distinguished member of the Lord Chamberlain company, and a sharer in the undertaking at the Blackfriars.”Thereis no evidence that William had ‘risen to be a distinguished member’ of any players company in 1591 as this assumption is the result of the forged ‘certificate’ of John Payne Collier introduced by him in his book of 1831, much later proven to be a forgery. The authors’ first reason to believe that Spenser was referring to William in ‘Tears of the Muses’ is shakily built upon an invented ‘document’ written in the 19th century. ‘Tears of the Muses’ was printed in 1591. It would have been written earlier and a few months or a year made a great difference in reasoning whether William was well known to Spenser as a dramatist, and not to Spenser only, but to Spenser’s readers. William must be well known publicly in the manner Spenser describes this ‘person’ or the meaning of the lines coming from his character ‘Thalia the Muse’ would be lost to the reader.

So much can be contained in that little ‘if’. ‘Loue’s Labore Lost ’, as it was first called, was not considered to be written until about 1593 4. ‘Two Gentlemen’ may be dated of the year 1591 now but this was not credited to William until 1623 or not in WilliamShaxper’s lifetime and so neither of these plays provided any evidence in 1580 or his ‘given the clearest indications of high genius, abundantly sufficient to justify Spenser in applauding him’ in his poem printed in 1591. The name was never recorded anywhere before the fall of 1593, yet 30 years later an unidentified play is credited to a man seven years dead.

“That by ‘our pleasant Willy’, Spenser meant ‘William Shakespeare’ by the fact that such a character as he gives could belong to no other dramatist of the time. Greene can have no pretensions to it, or can Lodge, Kyd, or Peel; Marlowe had never touched comedy.”

Why must these lines refer to any of the poets or to any living person of the time ? A case could more easily be made that Spenser is referring to Marlowe, although no claim is made that he was. No entire play by Marlowe is considered to be a comedy in the sense that ‘Volpone’ is a comedy. Marlowe did write portions of his dramas that are considered satire, comedy or wit. Anyone who knew him personally as Spenser did through his association with Ralegh’s men, would appreciate Marlowe’s humour as Marlowe appreciated the humour of his friend, Tom Watson that Marlowe included in his plays. The later lines in the Spenser Stanza: “But that same gentle Spirit, from whose pen Large streams of honie and sweete Nectar flowe, Scorning the boldness of such base-borne men, Which dare their follies forth so rashlie throwe, Both rather choose to sit in idle Cell, than so himself to mockerie to sell.”

The expression, ‘Willy’, was found to be applied to Sir Philip Sidney in an Epilogue “preserved in Davidson’s ‘Poetical Rhapsody’”, printed in 1602. As with ‘shepherd’, ‘Willy’ was commonly used to mean ‘poet’.

This biographer’s use of the word, ‘predecessors’, is illuminating. William had no ‘predecessors’ in all of the biographers imagining that he was active in 1590 or sooner, the playwrights of ‘this time’ were not dead but would be young contemporaries, most writing at a younger age than William was in 1590. The biographers generally ignore who was living when these credits are being heaped upon William, and they overlook what was known to the public during a particular year. Claims and assumptions made in later centuries cannot be assumed to have been known by the public of the late 16th century. The author’s third reason concern events that had not happened in 1590.

These stanzas and six others are uttered by the character, ‘Thalia, the Muse of Comedy’ who laments the degeneration of the stage, especially in comedy, and she is followed upon stage by the Muses, Calliope and Melpomene. Marlowe had spent two weeks in Newgate prison in September 1589. He came out a different man. His plays were ‘gentler’, his themes were more personal, concentrating on one character rather than in his previous histories where the lines are more evenly distributed among the characters. For a time after Newgate, he was completely shattered by the experience of Bradley’s attack on his life in the street, and Bradley’s death by Tom Watson’s sword, blood spilled in his sight, the horrors of Newgate prison immediately after, a murder charge, and the long confinement of Watson for murder. Marlowe, at least for a time, would be ‘dead of late, with whom all joy and jolly merriment is also deaded, and in dolor drent’ and he ‘doth rather choose to sit in idle Cell than so himself to mockerie to sell’. The two ‘cell’s would be ironic. Spenser’s poem was printed in 1591. Marlowe was in a prison cell in 1589. Spenser says ‘our pleasant Willy’. This is the only word, ‘Willy’ which draws the seeker of Shakespearian embryos. Since none of the other reasons seem logical or some even possible, there is no reason to assume that this ‘Willy’ being adulated above all other contemporary dramatists is William. Anthony Rowe in 1709 introduced this idea that Spenser referred to William in his first edition of his ‘Life’ but he withdrew it in his second edition of 1714.

This biographer also suggests that Spenser might have known William in his early years because at one time there was an ‘Edmund Spenser’ who lived at Kingsbury in Warwickshire in 1569 when the author of ‘The Faerie Queene’ went to Cambridge at the age of seventeen. ‘Willy’ William at that time was five.

Spenser is seen by some to be referring to William again in his ‘Colin Clout’s come home againe’ in the line: “A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found”, but there is an additional line which is not quoted in reference to William: ‘Doth, like himself, heroically sound’. Both lines could refer to Marlowe, who being and sounding in his play more ‘heroic’ in 1590. As Marlowe related in his ‘Tamberlane’, Timur the Lame began as a ‘shepherd’ but ‘heroically’ conquered the world but why do they look for these painfully contrived references to William ? When this poem was written before 1591, Spenser was living in Kilcolman, Ireland, and while there, he was visited by Walter Ralegh who invited Spenser to come to London and to bring his three completed books of ‘The Faerie Queene’ for printing and to be known at Court. Spenser returned to Kilcolman to write his pastoral allegory ‘Colin Clout’ which he dedicated to Ralegh. Why would Spenser bother to refer, even in this most vague manner, to William, even if the name were well known, in his book of tribute to Ralegh ? ‘Colin Clout’ was written in 1591 but not published until 1595, recounting his experiences in the English Court in 1590, but Spenser did not say that he had ever met William Shakespeare. or that he ever met anyone who had met him. Spenser, while in England, tried to secure patronage in 1590, and in 1596 he tried again. Disappointed in these attempts at patronage, he returned to Ireland. On the printing of his ‘The Faerie Queene’, Spenser was the most enthusiastically received poet since Sir Philip Sidney’s posthumously printed sonnets, ‘Astrophel and Stella’, in 1591. He had the favour of Sir Walter Ralegh, was a secretary to Baron Grey de Wilton earlier, had lived at Lord Leicester’s house at seventeen, and was received at Court, yet his entire experience, his 13 printed volumes of poetry and his friendship with nobility did not produce patronage for him. Yet, the biographers of William claim that a totally unknown William in 1593 dedicated a poem ‘Venus and Adonis’ to a 20 year old Earl of Southampton and is accepted, a patronage for which there is no evidence nor has there been forwarded any known connection between the Earl and William, no letter, no invitation to the ball and no reference to the two by anyone, except the wildly inventive Wily Willy Davenant, William’s ‘son’ and heir to his fabled past.

With the continued attempt to find a reference to William long before 1593, later biographers came up with this Spencer poem, ‘Colin Clout’s come home againe’, with the line, ‘Whose Muse, full of high thought’s invention’. This poetic work was ‘published with a dedication dated 27th December 1591` but the biographer adds: “But Malone proved, beyond all cavil, that for 1591, we ought to read 1594, the printer having made an extraordinary blunder”.

Why is this Story of William so filled with exceptions, coincidences, ‘lost plays’, ‘the only’s’, the unusual, remarkable concurrences, and now a printer who, on this one poem that ‘refers’ to this one of a kind man, creates ‘an extraordinary blunder’ and dates this book as three years older than it should be dated while following written instructions from the publisher who Malone ignores. The ‘Funk and Wagnall’s Encyclopedia’ says that it was published in 1595, not 1594. It matters not as it was written in 1591 and does not refer to William, but it indicates how much the biographers in later centuries argued among themselves and in print about so many items that were of no consequence, about a legend that was hinted at and encouraged by the loveable wag, Sir William Davenant, taken seriously by the great ‘scholars since’, repeated and embellished by later biographers, enlarged by the forgers in ink and in print, pictured in oil paintings of several unknown men and although proven to be forgeries and misrepresentations, nurtured nevertheless for another century or more, with all of the assumptions that were inferred by the forgeries, continued to be claimed as true after their foundations had crumbled away..

There has been nothing forwarded that would distinguish the young son of John Shaxpere, glover and wool dealer, of humble Henley Street in Stratford, to draw the attention of Spenser, twelve years his senior, certainly nothing to write about. When William was fourteen to seventeen, Spenser was living in London at Lord Leicester’s house from 1578 to 1580.

Biographers present the inference that certain plays were known and seen by all and that theatres would have gone bankrupt without these plays by William. Leonard Digges is quite elaborate in this accusation against the plays of Jonson and others in his praise of William in his verse printed in 1632. Hundreds of plays were written to supply the companies as evidenced in Henslowe’s diary at the time. Henslowe never produced any of the Plays of the First Folio and prospered well without them.

After the death of Queen Elizabeth, Thomas Chettle wrote his ‘England’s Mourning Garment’ wherein he reproached the poets of the day for neglecting to write poems in honour of her passing. Included is the verse:“Nor doth the silver-tongued Melicert Drop from his honied Muse one sable tear, To mourn her death that graced his desert, And to his lay open’d her royal ear. Shepherd, remember our Elizabeth, And sing her Rape, done by that Tarquin death.”

Why, in 1603, is there no reference to any Play ? Chettle who now is a playwright himself calls upon the ‘poets’. Why would William be thought amiss for not writing a poem to Elizabeth’s passing ? He had never been credited with poetry for the past ten years. At the time that is claimed to be the peak of his popularity, William is supposed to be the ‘poet’ referred to only as ‘Melicert’. Why is this a reference to William and not to any poet since all the poets are being appealed ? Is it because of the word, ‘honied’, that often described the poetry of ‘Venus and Adonis’ ? Several poets had used ‘sweet’ words in their sonnets including Richard Barnfield’s ‘Certain Sonnets’. It was a part of the sonnet popularity particularly the lesser sonnet writing that amused the students of the Inns of Court. Is it because Elizabeth ‘open’d her royal ear’ to his lays ? Elizabeth had the plays of many playwrights brought before her at Court, and the two poems, ‘Venus’ and ‘Lucrece’ in her day were never to be compared with the ‘lays’ of Spenser and Sidney ? It is because the verse included the words, ‘Rape’ and ‘Tarquin’ ? ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ and ‘Venus and Adonis’ covered ancient characters and themes that were used by many contemporary writers and poets.

Thomas Lodge had treated the theme in his version of the classic tale of ‘Glaucus and Silla’ in his ‘Scillaes Metamorphoses’ in 1589 that Puttenham in his Richard Field printed book, ‘The Arte of English Poesie’, 1589, said of Lodge’s use of the six line stanza (ababcc): “Not only the most usual but also very pleasant to th’ eare”. The origin of the story was ‘Metamorphoses’ of Ovid. The poet, Henry Constable (1562 1613) wrote The Shepherd’s song of ‘Venus and Adonis’ before 1592. Similar narrative poems were Michael Drayton’s ‘Endymion and Phoebe’, and Chapman’s 1563 1631 ‘Ovid’s Banquet of Sense’. Why in all of these supposed references is William not called by an identifiable name ? Why, when the phrase ‘gentle spirit’ or a ‘gentler shepherd’ appears in a Spenser poem, it is William to whom he supposedly refers ? It is claimed that the printer made ‘an extraordinary blunder’ and that he should have dated ‘Colin Clout’ as printed in 1594 ?

Spenser is claimed to have hailed William for comedy in ‘Tears of the Muses’ and later for ‘heroic’ plays in ‘Colin Clout’ which is the opposite to the ‘chronology’ of the plays credited to him ‘2 Henry VI’ is supposed to be first (1591), then ‘Comedy of Errors’ and ‘Two Gentlemen’ (1591). These are considered to be written in 1591 with no play before 1591. None was printed before ‘Contention’ (2 Henry VI) in 1594 and William’s name was not included at that time and was never found in print before the fall of 1593. Spenser was in London for about a year between 1590 and 1591. Why would Spenser know of any particular play being presented in London of the dozens of plays being presented every month by several acting companies ? It is not known that Spenser even attended a theatre while on his busy visit to London while publishing his books, being at Court, and desperately seeking a patron.

So Spenser mentions Alabaster and Daniel by name. Biographers usually neglect to reveal this. If Spenser can define Daniel by name, it embarrasses the biographers as all would ask why he would need to be so vague in naming William who is supposed, but only by the biographers of later centuries, to be the most famous poet in the land ? Samuel Daniel (1562 1619) was ‘a meticulous poet who revised and republished his works and was cited for the ‘purity of his language and style’. He began his career about 1590, yet he is named in ‘Colin Clout’ in the following year. He wrote in 1590, ‘Complaint of Rosamunde’ that was in the same metre, the seven lined stanza, as was used four years later in ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ and was of the same content.Since Spenser mentions Alabaster and Daniel directly by name, yet this famous poet is hesitant to name William as only ‘gentle spirit’ when he feels at ease to refer to a centuries old character, the familiar ‘Tarquin’, by name and the contemporary poet, Daniel, by name. The words, ‘shepherd’ and even ‘Willy’, were common metaphors for the word ‘poet’ as in Chettle’s ‘Shepherd, remember our Elizabeth’, addressed to all living poets.

Is this because ‘Venus and Adonis’ was not printed until late in 1593 and the historian biographers would rather Spencer to be referring to ‘Venus and Adonis’? The biographer says about Spenser’s ‘Colin Clout’: “In that poem (after the author has spoken of many living and dead poets, some by their names, as Alabaster and Daniel, and others by fictitious and fanciful appellations he inserts these lines: ‘And these, though last not least, is Aetion, A gentler shepherd may no where be found, Whose Muse, full of high thought’s invention, Doth, like himself, heroically sound’.”

The town of Stratford was entered over a stone bridge built before 1500 by the money of Hugh Clopton, who made his fortune in London in trade. ‘Having neither wife not child’, he devoted much of his wealth to ‘good works’ that were the pride of the townspeople.

The main street of Stratford, Bridge Street, runs up to the intersection of Henley Street and High Street. Along Henley Street were two houses of the Shaxper family, one was the house where William Shaxper was born, the other his father, John, used as his ‘glover’ and wool dealer shop. One early biographer claimed that William was unusually attached to his native town ‘coming back there often for the summer’ which statement conflicts with the prevalent claim that William was an actor in London. Another biographer said that William made the 120 mile journey from London to Stratford ‘once a year’.

More is known of the ‘neighbours’ on this back street than is known of the ‘Author’.

Next door to the Henley Street houses lived William Wedgewood, a tailor. He had been banished from Warwick by the Earl and had his livery taken from him. ‘Leaving his wife he went to Stratford there married another wife, his first wife yet living; besides that, he is a man very contentious, proud and slanderous, oft busying himself with naughty matters in quarrelling with his neighbours’. A few doors away lived Gilbert also a glover and after whom William’s young brother, Gilbert was named. Also on Henley Street lived George Whateley, who was bailiff in 1564. He had a house and a woollen draper shop, beehives in the garden and ‘wax honey and things in the apple chamber’. He could not write but in 1586, he endowed a school in the town where he was born, ‘Henley in Arden’, several miles to the north west, to teach thirty children reading, writing and arithmetic. Co incidentally (?), on November 26th 1582, the name on the licence sited for marriage to William Shaxpere was ‘Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton’.

In support of their contention that the man who wrote the 36 Plays in the First Folio of 1623 was the man with a similar name who was born in Stratford in 1564 and buried at the church on High Street at Stratford in 1616, biographers of ‘William Shake speare’ have said that there is more known of ‘Shakespeare’ than is known of Thomas Kyd or any other writer living during contemporary Elizabethan England. Nothing was known of the Stratford man until the middle of the 19th century when a member of the Shakespeare Society of London was the first to open town documents at Stratford. No one has taken the same measures to collect information about Kyd or other playwrights as so many biographers have taken to search the poems of others to claim references to ‘Willy’ or to collect the correspondence of town residents to determine personal information about the identity of ‘Shakespeare’, and so when the biographers say that more is known of the man who wrote the 36 plays, they are referring only to the Stratford man.

STRATFORD Robert J. Meyer

William Camden, who was Ben Jonson’s schoolmaster, wrote of his visit to Stratford calling it ‘a proper little market town, beholden for all the beauty that it hath to two men there bred and brought up. They were Archbishop John de Stratford and Sir Hugh Clopton. One of the Clopton heiresses married Sir George Carew, ‘whom I am more willing to honour in this respect, if there were not other, for that he is a most affection lover of venerable antiquities’. He was Master of the Ordnance and Lieutenant General in Ireland and he lies in the Clopton chapel at Stratford.Billesley Hall, a few miles west of Stratford, was owned by Thomas Trussel who conveyed it away in 1585 and then took to highway robbery that summer on the Old Kent Road for which he was sentenced to death in 1588.

The identities of the friends and neighbours of the man, William Shaxper of Stratford, are by now complete but the information about ‘William Shake speare’ has never increased and the identity of the Author is still unknown.

Downtown Stratford was dominated by the tower of the Gild Chapel, built by Hugh Clopton, and it was the Gild Hall where the meetings of council took place and which also housed the grammar school, the almshouses and the rooms for the vicar and the school master. “This Clopton builded also the north side of this chapel a pretty house of brick and timber, where in he lay in his latter day.” This was ‘New Place’. William bought this house on Chapel Street in May ofThe1597.adjoining house on the street was the home of Thomas Nashe who married William’s grand daughter, Elizabeth Hall. Next is the house of Julian Shaw who witnessed William’s will. Next, the house of Thomas Reynolds and his son, William, who occupied a farm near the church and had the largest household in town, 22 persons including servants. William Shaxper left William Reynolds 26 shillings, eight pence ‘to buy a ring’. Across the street was the Falcon Hotel. In front of the chapel was a market cross, one of three in town, where dealers in butter, cheese, and white meats gathered after 1608. The butchers collected on Chapel Street. From New Place were seen ‘market folks that come to sell their corn’, ‘the vulgar sort of market men at wakes and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs’.

on High Street lived William’s friend, Henry Walker, a mercer, who named his son after William who was his godfather, and to the son, William left a gold sovereign in his will. Philip Rogers was the apothecary of High Street, selling liquorice, aniseed, sarsaparilla, sassafras and ‘tobecka’ from the ‘new world’. The daughter of alderman Rogers who built the house with the best wood carving in town, called Harvard House, married a Harvard of Southwark and she then became the mother of the founder of Harvard College in America. William took Philip Rogers to court in 1604 to regain one pound, nineteen shillings, ten pence owing for malt.

On High Street, too, were Hamnet and Judith Sadler, after whom the Shaxper twins were named. The name, Hamnet, was common and was not influenced by the word ‘Hamlet’ as some biographers claim; an insult to the ‘Author’ to imply that he would have mistaken his own play’s name.Down stream was Rather Street where the cattle market was held. On the south side stood the large house of prosperous Abraham Sturley, with its plaster ceilings and friezes within. Sturley was a friend of alderman Quiney who wrote the only existing letter written to William. In it Quiney asked for a loan of 30 pounds. On Rather Street was the King’s House, an inn owned by the rich brewer, Robert Perrott, who cut his daughter out of his will for marrying Richard Tyler, as a warning to his other two daughters. The couple had a boy whom they called William and to whom William left 26 shillings eight pence for a ring ‘to remember him by’.

Back down at the corner was High Street, business street, where the leading people of town lived, the principal burgesses and the prosperous shopkeepers, the Quineys, Rogerses, Sadlers, Walkers and the Woolmers. On High Street lived Adrian Quiney, a mercer, who was on the town council with John Shaxper. Adrian was the father of Richard Quiney who would interest William in various investments. Richard was a bailiff who died in 1602 from a head wound sustained while trying to quell a brawl at Fair time. Adrian’s son, Thomas, was a grammar school boy who would write his father a ‘good Latin letter’. Thomas married William’s daughter Judith. Adrian married Laurence Bayton’s widow and moved into her High Street house. He rented the house next door where his stepson, Charles Bayton, kept a general store selling everything from sugarloaves to gunpowder. On the other side was John Smith’s Tavern for cakes and ale. When Smith became a bailiff in 1598, Quiney’s friend, Sturley, wrote that he ‘doth baily it exceeding many of his predecessors beyond all expectations well’. Smith married Hamnet Sadler’s sister, Margaret.Also

Many biographers ascribed this verse to ‘Shakespeare’, quite another insult to the Author. William’s effigy was made by the same Gheerhart Janssen family. The effigies are both on the north side of the chancel in the Trinity Church at Stratford.

Also in the town lived John Combe who had grown rich by money lending and by acquiring monastic and church properties. He left two sons, John and William. Like his father, John Combe Junior was a moneylender but a pious and grave Protestant. In his will, as a bachelor, he left 10 pounds to Francis Collins, 20 shillings to Henry Walker, 5 pounds to Sir Francis Smith to buy him a hawk and to Lady Anne, Smith’s wife, 40 pounds to buy her a basin and ewer. To William he left 5 pounds. To the ‘poor’ he gave 20 pounds; to fifteen young tradesmen to help them in trade, 100 pounds ‘on loan’, and 100 pounds to three old servants and 10 black gowns to poor folk to follow him to his grave, each worth 13 shillings, 4 pence. A large sum of money was left to build a great tomb for himself. It was an alabaster and marble recumbent effigy made by Gheerhart Janssen in his Southwark shop at London. Also in his will Combe released a shilling in the pound to all his ‘good and just debtors’ but the debtors fastened an epitaph to his tomb: “Ten in the hundred the Devil allows, But Combe will have twelve he swears and avows.

A portion of land was sold in 1568 to Lodowick Greville a resident of Milcote. In 1579, he was imprisoned for attacking Sir John Conway of Arrow street in London. A tenant of his, Thomas Webbe, was a well to do bachelor. Greville invited him over from Oxfordshire to dine. Afterwards Greville had him strangled in his bed, then made a servant impersonate Webbe dying, called in a parson to make Webbe’s will in favour of himself. When one of the involved servants while ‘in his cups in Stratford’, told of this, Greville was arrested and he confessed. Greville was put in the Tower but he would not say anything. He remained silent to save his estates for his son and was pressed to death on the 14th of November in 1589. The land that he bought in 1568 was shortly sold to Lady Griffin for her son, and when Rice Griffin attained his majority, he wasted his estate and, in debt, sold the land to John Combe. Stratford William bought 120 acres of land from William Combe of Warwickshire and John Combe of Old Stratford in 1602. This was land that the Clopton family had once owned. William also had business dealings with John Combe with corn tithes at Welcome. To Thomas Combe, William left hisJohnsword.Combe died in 1614. His son and heir, William Combe, immediately proceeded to enclose the common fields at Welcome. William was a free holder of land and as a farmer of part of the tithes. The town clerk made a statement of interests held: “Master Shakespeare, four yardland, no common ground beyond Gospel Bush, nor ground in Sandfield nor none in Sloe Hill Field beyond Bishopton, nor none in the enclosure beyond Bishopton.” William was assured of compensation for any loss to his tithes. The town clerk, Thomas Greene, placed in his diary, “I also writ of myself to my cousin Shakespeare the copies of all our oaths made then, also a note of the inconveniences would grow by the enclosure”. Combe in defiance of the corporation went ahead with the hedging and ditching of his enclosure. The spelling of the 11 letter name here is likely incorrectly ‘corrected’ by the modern writer quoting these lines in his book.

John Combe’s brother, William, left his large estate to his nephews, Thomas and William. William Shaxpere bought 120 acres of land from William Combe of Warwickshire and John Combe of Old Stratford in 1602. William also had business dealings with John Combe with corn tithes at Welcome.

If anyone asks who lies in this tomb, ‘Oh’, quoth the Devil, ‘‘Tis my John a Combe,’

Richard Quiney was revealed to be holding 47 quarters of barley and 32 of malt, but he was not prosecuted for being in defiance of the Council’s edict. The parish priest in Stratford and Sir Thomas Lucy had gambled on the malt market. Only a dozen citizens in Stratford had more than William, including Quiney and Sturley. Yet, one critic estimates William as “a shrewd, conservative, far sighted and moderate man”. Another critic feels “He would naturally be desirous to be well provided with the main articles of subsistence in proportion to the number of his family in time of scarcity”. The name of his father, John, was nowhere listed as the food stocks were in William’s name. There could not have been more than six people in father John’s household, William being at London, whereas in the house 3rd next to New Place, Thomas Reynolds and his son had a household of 22 persons.

The Mr Aspinall with the 11 quarters of corn was Alexander Aspinall, who was headmaster of the school in Gild Hall from 1582 to 1624. He married the widow of a Shaw on Henley Street who had inherited her husband’s wool business. He was engaged in trade with buying and selling of malt and he became burgess, alderman, chamberlain and head borough of Chapel Ward. Declining being bailiff, the Council kept him on “in regard of this sufficiency for his continual advice and great experience in the borough affairs, and in regard he is an ancient Master of Art and a man learned”.

Some tenants filled in the ditches and were thrown to the ground by Combe’s men while he “sat laughing on his horseback and said they were good football players”. A great number of people came from Stratford and Bishopton to fill in the ditches and pull down the mounds.

In many references near the end of the 17th century the final ‘e’ was dropped. ‘Chapple’ became Chapel.In 1597, a shortage of grain had resulted from three previous summer rains that had destroyed crops. Exports of grain were prohibited, and maltsters were ordered to restrict their trade. In August, the shortage continued. During the previous summer, the price of wheat had risen to six, then seven and eight shillings a bushel. Now, in the summer of 1597, the price rose to 13 shillings, fell to ten, and then rose again. The Town Council wrote that “a number of wicked people, in condition more like to wolves and cormorants than to natural men” among whom were “men which are of good livelihood” who were hoarding stocks looking for a rise in prices. These men included Richard Quiney and Abraham Sturley who were reported to be ‘great corn buyers’. By January of 1598, Sturley warned Quiney that the people were growing ‘malcontent’. Because malt was necessary for making bread, maltsters were hated. A local tradesman said that he expected “within a week to lead some of the maltsters in a halter”. Another said that “If God send my Lord of Essex down shortly”, he hoped “to see them hanged on gibbets at their own doors”. By the fourth of February, the Council took “The noate of corne and malte, taken the 4th of February, 1597, in the 40th year of the raigne of our most gracious Soveraigne Ladie, Queene Elizabeth”. Everyone in town was listed. In the Chapel Street ward, “Wm Shackespere” was listed as having 10 quarters of corn, Mr Aspinall, 11 quarters and Mr Thomas Dyxon, 17 and a half quarters, all others had from 3 to 8 quarters of corn.

It is uncertain of the original spelling of ‘Shakespeare’ in a modern biography as in the belief that William of Stratford is the Author of the Plays, the spelling of most of the early writings is modernized and the name is changed to the spelling of the name found on the Folios.

Clerk’s diary: “September. Master Shakespeare’s telling J. Greene that he was not able to bear the enclosing of Welcome”. Eventually William Combe was defeated. From Greene in London, 17 November, 1614: “My cousin Shakespeare coming yesterday to town, I sent to see him how he did. He told me that they assured him they meant to enclose no further than to Gospel Bush. He and Master Hall says they think nothing will be done.”

In their late quest for information to enter into the blank slate of their Great Poet, any small detail would be prized, the biographers of the 19th and 20th centuries amalgamated what would be known of any villager of the late 16th century. No one seemed to be interested in determining any information whatever about Thomas Kyd or Robert Greene.

Thomas Kyd (1557 1595) was born in London, educated at the Merchant Taylor’s School at London. He was one of the important dramatists of that short period of new English Theatre, 1583 1610, as he wrote successful plays, ‘The First Part of Ieronimo’ that is a prologue to his most known play, ‘The Spanish Tragedy’, and ‘The Tragedy of Solyman and Perseda’. Evidence of Kyd’s influence of horrifying melodrama is within ‘Titus Andronicus” that would necessitate great experience to but imitate the style. Kyd also wrote a play, ‘Hamlet’, that now is considered to be ‘lost’, or this, too, is now confined in another ‘Hamlet’.

The official records reveal that Stratford Willy never owned books, never wrote anything, dictated his will, and this leaves the slate still clean of any information regarding the Author of the Plays if all of the Plays have but one Author.

The Henry Walker in Combe’s will for 20 shillings is the same Henry Walker to whose son William left a gold sovereign, William Walker. The Francis Collins in Combe’s will for 10 pounds was the Francis Collins to whom William left 13 pounds, 6 shillings and 8 pence b y bettering Combe by 3 pounds, 16 shillings and 8 pence. Collins was a lawyer who drafted Combe’s will and also William’s will and was an overseer of it. The witnesses of William’s will were Francis Collins and Julian Shaw of Chapel Street, Hamnet Sadler of High Street along with John Robinson and Robert Whatcott. The will was dated 25 March 1616 at which time William described himself as “in perfect health and memory, God be praised”. This ‘second’ draft of the first page was necessitated, as the biographers would have it, by the marriage of his daughter Judith to Adrian Quiney’s son, Richard, in February 1616. William left her 150 pounds in the marriage portion with another 50 on the condition that she gives up any claim to the cottage in Chapel Lane and if she lived three years after the will, another 150 pounds. If she dies without issue within the next three years, the 150 pounds was to be divided between his “niece Elizabeth Hall”, 100 pounds, and Joan Hart and her children. Elizabeth Hall was his grand daughter, not his ‘niece’. Joan was his sister who received 20 pounds, all his wearing apparel and she would live in the old house on Henley Street for life no longer paying his family rent as she had been paying him. Her three sons, William, Thomas and Michael, received 5 pounds each but William “couldn’t remember” the name of her second son. The Quineys had a son, “Shakespeare Quiney”, [spelling is doubtful] in November of 1616 but he died the following year. “He had thought of leaving a marriage-portion for grand-daughter Elizabeth but cancelled it because she was too young.” She was eight, born in February 1608. There is no mention, deleted or not, of a ‘marriage portion’ for Elizabeth in the Will.

The Francis Smith in John Combe’s will is Sir Francis Smith, the son of Sir John Smith, a Baron of Exchequer, whose widow in 1559 bought a manor house in the parish of Wooton Wawen in the little market town of Henley in Arden outside Stratford. She bought it for their son and heir Sir Francis Smith. There is a Fraunces Smythe, Jr. who is on the malt list of Chapel Street owning three quarters of corn.

It was believed that when Alexander wooed the Widow Shaw with the gift of a pair of gloves, ‘Shakespeare’ wrote a poesy for him: “The gift is small, the will is all: Alexander Aspinall”. This is considered an example of the genius of their Great Poet.

The long era of imperial conquests by France’s conquering kings and kin.

If there is a single date on which the future of the modern world teetered under tremulous stress, It is not 1492 but the year 1483 when the game board of Guess Is Europe’s three coastal kingdoms in the west. Which would win ? Which would yield ?

There lies the ‘Atlantic Abyss’, sister to the ‘Earth’s Edge’, guarding the gilt coins of power.

The player pieces, the pawns on the field Are four kings, a queen and a single over-jumping knight.

Lisbon ships have gone beyond Cape No. Their success, however secret, and their mystery bring zest and import to his zeal. His impatience adds to urgency to realize the ports of Guinea, the goal where he must go, But how can he join an exclusive journey around and past ‘Cape No’ ?

.Parliament proclaims Richard the Third as king to carry Upon his head the golden round and, by frail nature, an envious mountain on his back. This popular Prince cultivates interests in England abroad, Brings reforms at home pleasing every man Jack.

In 1483, this year of epic upheaval, England’s King Edward the Fourth Dies leaving a child king in bereavement to the care of brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, Who, one supposes, Fought his brother’s battles in the long and bloody War of Roses. Richard in this year of 1483, overthrows the scheming family Of the Queen Mother, Elizabeth Woodville, and drives them to the sea.

In 1483, the year of historic change and chance. A new king grasps the powerful throne of France. Charles the Eighth will weld Brittany to his kingdom By marrying Anne of that land, and he will soon attack Naples to begin

“The Equator’s heat of Hell explodes all ships in combustive fires”, they said. The headland of the Moroccan Coast has the warning name, ‘Cape No’, held by all in dread. By all but not Columbus. To him the known unknown is real.

THAT FATEFUL YEAR Robert J. Meyer

When the children of his brother, Edward, are pronounced illegal As their father had contracted another woman to marry, not regal.

Found in written remembrances of unknown shores in the nebulous North West.

Columbus and Cathay! Nothing between them lay No lands conceded by a scholarly Greek No lingering legend or twice told sea tale that one could in any saga seek No such Viking voyage in any sailor’s song or sea-dog’s story - no Nordic quest

The south ocean is shrouded in whispered terms to make the curious cower.

Only the known unknown lay in the southern routes to the Equator’s wealth, Held sacred by those who knew but kept them secret by covetous clandestine stealth.

As his wife Felipe’s father, an old man of the sea, Had opened to him his pilot books and notations Of Southern routes to the ocean’s outer island locations, So Felipe’s mother, Dona Moniz, by her noble lineage in Cadiz Opens to Christoforo access to influential persons in Lisbon’s court, And soon he is on board a rare expedition to a Gulf of Guinea port.

Her mother is related to Canon Fernando Marius who knows Paola Toscanelli, astrologer to Comino de Medici.

Six years before, Ferdinand placed the Holy Brotherhood, The Military Police, in complete control position.

His reply comes with detailed maps, ‘The shortest road to the spices is across the western sea’. These forgotten annotations are quickly buried deep into the dark and Royal files, Yet, on Christoforo’s copy of ‘Historica Rerum’, kept close to him on all the voyages he would Cansail still be read there, the same directives copied out in precise and complete detail.

The Lisbon King John the Second soon commands Christoforo to his presence and beckons him to Hespeak.hears his calculations, arguments and proposals and the irresistible promise of gold that he would seek. Not from ignorance does King John make decision. All courts have globes, all know the roundness of the planet.

Three years before, the Pope empowered King and Queen Did establish the Spanish Inquisition !

Two centuries past, Marco Polo claimed that he had traveled east to gain it. Christoforo Columbo will sail westward to obtain it.

As these three Kings and Queen sit conspiring new empires, The single Knight in this gambit Game of Guess Is now prepared to make his determined move.

Christoforo has, in truth, sailed to the Equator And found the real Ocean of Atlantic greater Than described on maps of the half world that Ptolomey had deemed. He has weathered the never known, looked upon fauna and flora That Socrates never knew nor dreamed or guessed On the Guinea Coast he touched what he knows will most Convince the King and Queen to support him in his quest Beyond logic or reason, argument or proof is the convincing element of gold and where it lay. Gold is the answer the standard to pin his banner upon To sweep across the open sea to Cipango and Cathay !

No king can refuse the power held in the riches that lay In the lands awaiting this hour in the west.

In 1483, this year of irrevocable decision, the throne of Spain is firmly held By Ferdinand the First, King of Aragon, Sicily and Castile who did closely weld His Spanish kingdoms under one umbrella By wedding the Queen of Castile, his cousin, Isabella, Who alone wears the sovereign crown as ensuing events will prove.

On behalf of King Alfonse the Fifth, Marius asks Toscanelli ‘What is the shortest route to the far Indies Isles ?’

Only four European kingdoms have ocean ports for embarkation to the Westward Main And a monarch rich enough to be a patron, Lisbon, England, France and Spain. Any one of their kings would welcome the chance to widen his influence among expanding realms. Not one would refrain. Once again Felipe’s ties with the royal court at Lisbon give possible solutions to his plea.

King John with justified pronouncement refuses the request !

If Christopher Columbus did decide to enter with proud stride London’s Bishop’s Gate and bring To Richard there to be the heir of all his wished for dreams, If Richard the Third had only heard the allure of Columbus’ schemes, The plans outlaid for wealth in trade, an English empire won. If Richard had signed this grand design to sail westward to the Sun, Good King Richard would then belong to the cheering cap throwing throng at Bristol’s ocean shore.

The king heeds well his cosmographers, his bishop and two experts in nautical geography all learned men from college. Their erudite opinions on this latest of proposals are grounded well in knowledge of the planet, And, like all knowledgeable scholars, their full satisfaction ends...with knowledge etched in Notgranite,with lived experience, skills or personal action.

Now to which Royal Court should Christoforo now implore At this desperate moment in Fourteen Eighty four ?

Is he truly mad ? Merely a fool with schemes ? These he may have asked himself in private thought, But he never ever asked, ‘Should he relinquish the quest ?’

Eight years of reading, pleading, sailing and detailing, Calculating a precise direction. Has he hypnotized himself with dreams ?

All their theoretical techniques admit that a westward voyage is an entirely possible one But not one would ever dream of putting this voyage to the test, As only a madman would ever attempt what never has been done.

Eight years in Lisbon ends in total abject rejection !

If Christophe had sailed with the same intent but under the Fleur de lis’ bless, Would history’s praise or vituperation of him be any the more or less ?

His design was not wrong, only perhaps the manner of appealing to a monarch’s pride in his royal request. No king should refuse either everlasting honour in history’s acclaim Or personal glory in his temporal fame.

Under the Fleur de lis, the imperial banner of monarchical rule over feods and feodal feoffs, The new world to come would inherit a similar tongue and identical binding beliefs.

But had he then, not as Christobal Colon supplicating to the sovereigns of Spain But as Christopher Columbus had chosen England instead during Richard the Third’s early reign, What a pendulum swing of Fate would undoubtedly await the English King.

There lay the unchangeable fate of a new world’s state, The one true chance for release in renaissance a rebirth For half the future peoples of this Earth. Had he then, as Christophe Colombe, entered the Court of King Charles of France, Upon which uncharted course would history so set sail by chance ?

Which merest meager point shall over ride all imports to decide In this one only man’s mind inside ?

If Richard the Third had only heard the great design of Columbus’ plan, He would not have born the Fate forsworn for him forever in the annals of Man; Nor would his life be heard in base corrupted word and derided in false portray On some frail stage in each future age in an authorless obscure play.

Richard’s face would not fall to disgrace the battle ground of mud And Bosworth Field would never yield to swallow Richard’s blood.

They would bear their king aloft as the tiny fleet sailed off to their wild exultant roar, And to Richard’s side the ever swelling tide of loyal men would swear To defend his ban on the Woodville clan and bear Him on the broad shoulders of his stout hearted soldiers in that spring of Eighty five, All eager to involve themselves with bold resolve to keep their king alive.

The little princes would never feel the betrayal steel of the Earl of Richmond’s hate, And without the Earl, there would unfurl no flag of Henry Eight ! No Henry, no Elizabeth, and with no Queen Bess in town, No bloody ax for Mary, but still a deserving crown, And the crowd filled street would proudly greet her with no less cry than this: “God for Mary... England... and Saint Chris !”

To those who love a mystery, the Will and Testament of Stratford William is the most complex challenge with as many puzzling facets as the mystery that the biographers have made of the man Collectively,himself.William’s

To examine this legend: The first page is dated “Vicesimo quinto die (Januarij) Martij... annoque Domini 1616”. ‘January’ is crossed out several times and ‘March’ is scribbled in to the right above. The day, ‘twenty-five’ and the year ‘1616’ remain untouched.

“THE WILL WE WILL HAVE THE WILL” Robert J. Meyer

A complete reading of the entire transcript of the will in the original spelling and a photograph of the three pages of the original script, however, invites the examiner into one engrossing mystery upon another, their complexities never hinted at in the excerpts as presented in modernWhenbiographies.thewillwas

written: The general consensus claims that Stratford William in January of 1616 ‘summoned his lawyer Francis Collins’ to prepare the writing of his will as he would dictate it. Either Collins or his scrivener wrote out William’s ‘careful and exact requests’ to his family and his friends, ‘more requests than are generally found in wills of this period’, on three large sheets of paper ‘each measuring twelve by fifteen inches’. The story continues that two weeks after the will was drawn, daughter Judith marries Thomas Quiney on February 10, 1616, and that William ‘tore out’ the first page of the will for reasons that include that ‘he objected to the wedding’, (‘the wedding was secret’) with Thomas Quiney, the son of his long time friend, Richard, that he did not approve of Thomas as ‘he drank’, or that three days after the marriage, a Margaret Wheeler died giving birth to Thomas’ child, both child and Margaret ‘buried on March 15, 1616, in the graveyard of Holy Trinity Church’.

biographers reveal only snippets of the will, usually to enhance the image of the ‘great poet’ and to emphasize his ‘considerable’ generosity to his many friends. Only a few of the strange details are revealed when they can be accompanied by a flattering comment or a sympathetic explanation or excuse.

“You have forgotten the will I told you of.” “Read the will we’ll hear it !” “It will inflame you it will make you mad” “You shall read us the will !”

Other events follow: Judith and Thomas fail to appear when summoned to Court for not obtaining a license from the Consistory Court at Worcester Cathedral and are thereby excommunicated on March 16. The day before, William changes his will by ‘rewriting’ page one and carrying over page one onto two lines of page two. The purpose of ‘summoning his lawyer’ the second time is to eliminate the possibility of Quiney profiting from his ‘considerable estate’.

The crossed-out word for January, ‘Januarij’, and the written-in word for March, ‘Martij’, are probably the reason for the belief that William, on March 25, “rewrote” page one of the will that had been originally written in January and that in the rewriting of it, Collins or his scrivener copied down mistakenly ‘January’ from the original page one and then crossed it out and continued on to write the revised page one for the supposed reason that he wished to modify Judith’s inheritance, since he was dissatisfied with the circumstances of her marriage to Thomas Quiney whom she had known all her life and who was the son of her father’s close friend.

“You will compel me then to read the will ?”

Thomas Quiney was well educated in French and Latin and although fined a shilling for allowing tippling at his house, he was a vintner and operated a tavern next door to his mother’s house. There is no reason for his being described in 20th century biographies as ‘a vintner he drank’, ‘turned out a tippler’, ‘something of a tippler’, and ‘apparently a shiftless person’, at least at the time of the marriage. The statement that Margaret Wheeler died three days after the wedding seems off since that would be February 13 and she was not buried until March 15. The three sheets of paper on which Will’s will is written do not measure ‘twelve by fifteen inches’. These inconsistencies continue in the biographical accounts of the will.

In this regard, William’s will follows the standard form in the handbook quite closely including “In the name of God, Amen. I, William Shackspeare, of Stratford upon Avon in the countie of Warr., gent., in perfect health and memorie, God be praysed, doe make and ordayne this my last will and testament in manner and forme followeing, that ys to saye, First, I comend my soule into the handes of God my Creator,” etc. None of this is William’s creation, it is all in the standard form handbook. That Francis Collins (Frauncis Collyns) was William’s lawyer was a supposition of Edmund Malone (1741 1812) and no evidence appears that he acted in a legal capacity for William. Collins was made town clerk the following year for a three month period before he died. Some biographers claim that Collins wrote the will since the handwriting was supposed to be the same as the handwriting in the town records that Collins made in 1617.

The speculation is both unlikely and unnecessary as William could hardly have been made aware of anything in February that he had not known about, the wedding to Quiney, two weeks before. If he had, why would he have waited until the 25th of March to alter the will ? If there were a first page that was destroyed and a new ‘page one’ written, the contents of that original first page are not known and the extent of any changes or whom they concerned would also be unknown.What reason is there, then, to believe that the entire will, including the existing page one, was not written and dated as it says, on March 25, 1616 ? The crossing out of ‘January’ does not necessarily indicate that the will was originally written in January or that this first page was copied or revised from an earlier first page dated in January. The confusion arises because this page is dated 1616 and the day and the year remain unaltered. A document drawn up on 25, January would have been dated 1615 ! Therefore, the reasoning goes, this first page had to be copied from another page that was dated January 1615 but the word January was copied mistakenly onto this page in the month of March and had to be crossed out, but a crossed out ‘January’ does not demand a previous page one. In Jacobean times, the year still began on March 25, as this will is dated. A document written on the previous January two months earlier would be correctly dated 25, January 1615. Anything so dated found now is considered to be in 1616 but the document would read 1615. Writing ‘January’ during March is a mistake possibly caused when the writer, whoever he was, copies down the beginning wording from a handbook that displayed a standard legal form for wills and as most such legal forms used an example date in January as a rule, the writer copies out ‘January’ in error, corrects it, and continues to copy out the basic form filling in the necessary blanks with the appropriate names.

To examine further the legend as outlined in biographies: Not all bequests in the will are ‘exact’ and many are anything but ‘carefully written’. William’s will did not have more individual requests than ‘generally’ found. The will of actor Augustine Phillips of ‘the Lord Chamberlayne his Servauntes’ had a considerable number of ‘errors’

scholars claim and hand writing experts are ‘certain’ that this first page was written after the other pages as they see a different and unsure handwriting of a sick man, as if William could write anything but his scrawled name ! Almost all are convinced that William signed the third page first, then the second, and finally the first since the scrawling signatures could then be interpreted as written by a ‘fast fading hand’, but on page one, William has attested that he was ‘in perfect health and memorie’ and he solemnly swears this under ‘God by praysed’ after which he commends his ‘soule into the handes of God’. Neither William nor any of his witnesses would take such sworn statements lightly.

Another reason why scholars believe that the first page was rewritten is that the beginning lines of the second page are subsequently crossed out and new lines, carried over from the first page, are written above them. These excised lines refer to a ‘her’ including ‘for her best profitt, untill her mariage, and then the same with the increase thereof to be paied unto her’. The next sentence is unexcised and continues: ‘Item, I gyve and bequeath unto her all my plate that I now have att the date of this my will’. The scholars claim that ‘her’ throughout refers to Judith whom he had ‘demoted’ in his revised page one and that he now excises these lines that refer to ‘her’ up to the line ‘Item, I bequeath unto her all my plate’, which he leaves intact, but then crosses out ‘her’ of this line and writes in between lines ‘the saied Elizabeth Hall’, his grand daughter, but whom he names, aforesaid, as ‘my neece’. Now Elizabeth Hall is to receive all his plate, so he writes in between lines ‘except by brod silver and gilt bole’.

Near the end of page three, he has already placed an original line to Judith again: ‘Item, I gyve and bequeath to my saied daughter Judith by broad silver gilt bole’, Now, if he originally was referring to Judith on page two in the excised lines, as scholars claim, then he was referring also to Judith originally in the line following: ‘Item, I gyve and bequeath unto her all my plate’ which would include the ‘silver gilt bole’, as the new insertion deliberately excludes it.

Various excuses are devised for many of the constant errors in the will. His granddaughter is named ‘my neece Elizabeth Hall;’. (‘Alas ! He is confused’) His sister Joan is first listed as ‘my sister Johane Harte’ and later twice as ‘my saied sister Jone’. One of Joan Harte’s three sons is not named in the will but a space is left blank: ‘William Harte, ...... Harte, and Michaell Harte’. (‘He has forgotten his nephew’s name his memory is failing’. Poor man !) Hamnet Sadler after whom William named his own son, is written ‘Hamlett Sadler’. (‘The writer of the will naturally associated the great poet with his Hamlet !’) Then why are there two ‘t’s’ and anyone would have known Hamnet Sadler far more than ‘Hamlet’ and Sadler signs his name ‘Hamnet’ as one of the witnesses to the will ! Anyone in the house would have known the name of the third Harte boy ! These errors are not referred to in biographies as the biographers completely overlook the obvious in order to excuse the villager who, they believe, is the ‘great poet’.Many

The scholars choose to believe that William signs the pages in reverse order simply to support their conviction of a fast fading condition although he lived another month. They stand convinced of this on the belief that he is ‘the great author’, but ignore the existence of only a half dozen ‘scrawled signatures’ that are attributed to this man and nothing other in writing by a ‘WilliamAnotherShakespeare’.oversight: ‘I gyve and bequeath unto (her) [crossed out] the saied Elizabeth Hall [written in as a correction], all my plate, [then as an after thought] except my brod silver and gilt bole’. Then on page three: ‘All the rest of my goodes, chattels, leases, plate, etc...to my daughter Susanna’. All the ‘plate’ going to two people, granddaughter and daughter, indicates further that no legal mind reviewed the will.

The will of William has no such consistency, its scratchy penmanship in wavy lines, with abundant interlineal additions in small cramped script, great gashes through several sentences and several false starts, leaky pen blots and some sentences so scrawled that it took decades to decipher them.

Technically, this Will does not have initialled authorization throughout for the changes and it should have been rewritten properly, a task of only an hour. Another legal point is the question of why beneficiaries signed the will and why four witnesses signed when the legal requirement was for only two non beneficiaries ?

The worst aspect of the entire will is the wretched hand writing, the cramped additions between the original lines rendering it indecipherable to the point of not being permitted by a lawyer as legally sound. The answer to the enigma could be the suggestion that no lawyer or legal scrivener wrote this will.

That the scrivener of ‘Fra Collyns’ did not write out this will is evidenced by a comparison to one which he did write, the will of John Combe, dated January 28, 1613, just two years before by the calendar of the day.

The legible ‘secretary hand’ script of the Combe will is without amendments, its evenly formed letters in parallel lines across the page, and in large craftsman like printed letters across the top: ‘In the name of God Amen’.

Excuses continue that this amalgam of blots, blemishes, errors and scratch throughs is typical of the times but those who have examined countless wills of the time say that this will is the worst mangled batch of blunders ever witnessed as a proven will of the time.

There are more mysteries still: None of the will’s three sheets of foolscap are the same size and all three are from different makers. All are of three different lengths and widths and not one of the usual 12x16 inches. The sizes are: 12 1/8 by 15 5/8, 12 1/2 by 15 3/4 and 12 1/4 by 15 3/8.

Also, the excised lines clearly state: ‘for her best profitt, until her mariage’, which again may have prompted scholars to claim that he was referring to Judith’s marriage and that is why they claim that ‘her’ is Judith, and that also may be why they claim that the will was written in January, but he would hardly be referring to Judith as the banns of her marriage would have been entered already into the church in January if, as they claim, he wrote the will in January, and William could hardly believe that he would be dead and the will executed in two weeks time before her wedding. It is obvious, rather, that ‘her’ is the last word in the crossed out section that follows directly the reference to ‘saied sister Jone’, and not Judith as the ‘scholars’ claim.

If it is Judith to whom he bequeaths all of his plate, including the ‘bole’, why would he have repeated the ‘silver gilt bole’ in the unblemished line near the end of the will ?

The will ends with: “In witness whereof I have hereunto put my [seale] hand, the daie and yeare first above written” followed directly with “by me” then the signature, “William Shakspeare”. This is pronounced as ‘Shaks peare’ and not as ‘Shakes peare. Biographer Robert Payne comments: “It was as though he had no faith in seals, the hot wax stamped with the impress of his signet ring, but he had faith in the written word”. The word ‘seale’ is crossed out because William had no seal. This is known as a seal was borrowed from a Henry Lawrence on a similar but previous occasion. Why, then, was the word written into the will in the first place ? Was it routinely copied from the standard form book ? It would have been an unnecessary inconvenience to borrow a seal if he merely could have stamped the hot wax with a ‘signet ring’. The biographer, however, must turn all actions into references to the belief that this William was ‘the Author, a writer with his ‘faith in the written word’. That he owned a ring is not identified.

William’s name is included in the general text three times all three are formed differently, ‘Wm Shackspeare’, ‘William Shackspeare’ and ‘William Shakspeare’, the latter is the same spelling as is found in the will of John Combe leaving him five pounds.

The other authentic signature is that on the Bellott Mountjoy deposition when William gave witness and it is dated June 12, 1612 when he was at the age of 48 and this is illegible as to how many letters are in the spelling but the experts translate it as ‘William Shackper’ and it is smeared with an ink blot currently resting in the Public Records Office, London.

The signature on the third and final page of the will, the ‘most’ legible of any ‘authentic’ signatures is the one which is reproduced in books as being ‘his signature’. There is decidedly no ‘e’ after ‘Shak’ and what comes after ‘sp’ is again anyone’s interpretation, most likely only enough squiggles to supply ‘ere’ to form the usual ‘Shakspere’, but it is usually interpreted as being ‘Shakspeare’, still not the eleven letter name printed on the Quartos and Folio. These three signatures are considered of the six ‘authentic signatures of William of Stratford’. The uneven hand of the three signatures on the will are excused by saying that William was ill or even dying at the time, although he lived another full month, yet the signature on the third page is the most legible of the three, and if these are considered the signatures of a sick man, in which condition was he when signing the deed and the mortgage for the Blackfriars property two years earlier. Both are totally indecipherable wiggling scrawls that are ‘translated’ by the long deciphering experts as being “William Shakspear” on the conveyance for a gatehouse in Blackfriars, London, March 10, 1612, now in the Guildhall, City of London Library, and as “Wm Shakspea” [correct] on a mortgage to the Blackfriars gatehouse, March 11, 1612 ensconced in the British Museum Library. Any date before March 25, 1612 is now 1613.

On one occasion, his brother signed a receipt in his absence. There is no correspondence or notes kept from whatever business he had in London. It is known that he lent money but in this, the borrower would be the one to sign a promissory note that is discarded or destroyed when the borrower that William wrote the will, he is consistent in at least one detail, he never wrote his name in the context of the script nor did he sign it in an eleven letter spelling of his name. On the three occasions that the name is written into the text, they are all ‘Shacks’ or ‘Shaks’ and legibly so and the last one ends in ‘spere’.

Uponrepaid.thesupposition

These are the spellings in the printed ‘translation’ of the will’s written script and viewing the written facsimile, no one could be sure of any of the spelling of the names or most of the script.Collins and his scrivener, both professionals and experienced in preparing wills could not have so carelessly made these errors throughout. Collins signed the will and so it can be seen that the text is not in his handwriting. Any claimed similarity to Collins’ records in the town hall can be disregarded as they are not similar. Attempts have been made to match single letters of the ‘signatures’ with single letters in the body of the will as well as with the three names of William in the text. The comparisons leave only two alternatives as to who wrote the will. Either William wrote it, possibly at intervals, or somebody else wrote it and also wrote William’s name in all known instances on documents. These number six, possibly seven, including the three on the will. Since there is no known scrap of paper with writing by William, no letter, no receipt, no bill of sale, there is no evidence that this man could write and so the one alternative remains that someone signed for him.

A ‘seventh signature’ is supposed on the deed for a house sold to William Mountford by Adrian and Elizabeth Quiney dated ‘4 December 1612’. All of these signatures are from 1612 to 1616. The oddity in this document is that William’s daughter Judith is a witness to the deed and Judith does not place her signature as she is supposed to be ‘illiterate’, yet many ‘illiterates’ could write their names, but she places ‘her mark’ but the name ‘Shackspeare’ is written in script similar to the way the name is found in the text of the will.

The three most unusual odd sized sheets of paper on which the will is written present another puzzle. Since William has not engaged the services of a lawyer who would have charged by the number of lines of script in the document but would have supplied the standard paper, then sheets of clean foolscap are not available to him as they would be at a lawyer’s office and, as might be supposed, also at the house of a professional poet. He finds three sheets but they do not match, quite acceptable and natural for someone if he wishes to save a few pence but where is the supply of paper if he were the ‘great dramatist’ ?

Whether William wrote the will or dictated the details, the result is far from a legal composition that the world would expect from one whose ‘mind and hand went together and what he thought, he uttered with the easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers’ or from one ‘who but looks upon a page of Plutarch and all the scenes of Rome appear in his mind’ or ‘he had but to think of a thing and it is before him’. With William of Stratford, it seems that he scarce picked up a pen without leaving a blot upon the more by what it does not contain. The contents are quite consistent with what would be found in the will of a wealthy villager but far from what would be expected in the will of a ‘great poet’ who was also ‘rich’. Many of England’s honoured poets died penniless yet some were given noteworthy public funerals. As detailed as the will is in individual types of household possessions, books and papers are not included although private libraries were proud possessions of villagers who could afford the expense and these were passed on with care to specific inheritors who would prize them.

Thepaper.willreveals

These spellings show that William of Stratford spelled his name as his whole family spelled it with no ‘shake’ but as it was pronounced as ‘Shack’.

William’s son-in law, Dr John Hall, inherited a particular portion of his father’s collection and he bequeathed his own books and papers to his son in law. Also absent from the will is any mention of a memorial, no sum of money to pay for the cost, no description of it nor any wording to be carved upon it. Yet, between the years 1616 and 1623, the expensive effigy of William is placed on the wall of the Holy Trinity Church at Stratford. There is no evidence that any of his family, his wife, his sister, his daughter or son in law had any hand in it. Other than the possibility that the artist is Gheerart Janssen who would have been sixteen when William died, it is unknown who is responsible for its form, its cost or the wording inscribed below it. Yet, the facial features are understood to be taken from a death mask.Biographers have taken delight in describing how his ‘close and dear friends’ from the ‘Theatre’ were so thoughtfully remembered in his will giving them 26s, 8d each to bu y themselves remembrance rings, but we are never informed or reminded that Heminges, Burbadge and Condell were added, after the body of the text was completed, by a tightly cramped line inserted interlineally with the words, ‘and to my fellowes John Hemynge, Richard Burbage, and Henry Cundell, xxvjs viijd a peece to buy them rings’.

‘To Thomas Russel esquier fyve poundes and to Frauncis Collins, of the borough of Warr. in the countie of Warr. gentleman, thirteene poundes, sixe shillinges, and eight pence, to be paied within one yeare after my deceas’ these two men receive the largest bequests by far as they would be appointed later as ‘overseers’ of the will. These men are local people, well known to all in Stratford, yet they are specifically identified by borough and county. This further indicates that the players were added at a much later time as none is identified by city, borough or county which would be expected since they are not of Stratford nor are they identified as ‘gentlemen’ or even addressed as ‘Master’.

The sums and wording are already in the will for others, so the forger would merely copy information already in the will without needing to know how wills were worded in 1616. Yet, the sums in being the same as others in the will betray the supposed friendship with the players as they are granted no more than what this man has willed to villagers to whom he was not supposed to be close if he had spent some twenty or more years in London. If this line had been written in the original text in the size of script of the line below, the words would have extended for far more than one line. In the very small script that it is written, it extends almost the full distance across the page but not into the outside margin, so the writer must have known beforehand how long the line would be in the size of script necessary in order to determine where to begin nearer the left hand margin. This would suggest that it was practiced elsewhere. The line is quite legible even to the eye unprompted by the transcript. ‘To buy them rings’ is very legible while being possibly the smallest script in the will. The similar phrase, ‘to buy him a ring’ appears twice within a few lines previously.Toexamine this section that provides for those not of the family: ‘Item, I gyve and bequeath unto the poore of Stratford aforesaied tenn poundes; to Mr Thomas Combe my sword’ this is the only personal possession given to anyone other than to a family member.

To this point all sums of money are written out fully in English words, “fyve poundes’. From here, in the original before the revisions by him, the body of the will would have read: “Item, I gyve and bequeath to [ Richard Tyler the elder] xxvjs viijd to buy him A ringe; to my godson William Walker xxs in gold; to Anthonye Nashe gent, xxvjs viijd; and to Mr John Nashe xxvjs viijd [in gold].” Those words within brackets were then put a line through and substituting words were written in between the lines.

If Wllm of Stratford were a player, he would know that Heminges’ always spelt his name with an ‘s’ and the Burbadges spelled their name with a ‘d’. The forger did not know this and had a ‘y’ in Hymynge thinking that it would look ‘olden tyme’. All of the forgings had to be written between the original lines.

The manner in which the will is written with deletions and interlineal additions would be an invitation for this line to be added by another hand without drawing attention to it as a single addition and since it is information that would be expected and then taken for granted at a later time.

Roman numerals and single letter symbols are introduced to signify sums of money, the only section of the will to use them, considerably shortening the space needed to name the sums. This would have been the extent of allotments to those who are not family members. However, this section received a number of changes.

In the will, the words ‘coming, shillinges, lyving, believing, ensueing, followeing and everlastinge’ are uniformly spelled with ‘ing’ and never with a ‘yng’, yet, ‘Hemynge’ is spelled with a ‘y’ and with no ‘s’.

A line is drawn through ‘Mr Richard Tyler the elder’ and ‘Hamlett Sadler’ is written in above it. Then, inserted above at the end of the next line concerning William Walker, is, in tiny script, ‘to William Raynoldes gent xxvjs viijd to buy him a ringe’ - the same sum in Roman and the same wording as for Tyler originally. Both Anthonye and John Nashe receive individually the same sums in Roman as Tyler and Walker but instead of saying ‘to buy them ringes’, it makes no stipulation for Anthonye but John is to receive his ‘in gold’.

The only original ‘xxvjs viijd to buy him A ringe’, is the one to Tyler, very clear and legible with a capital ‘A’. The inserted line to Raynoldes is in small cramped script, the letters are not nearly so well defined, although the meaning cannot be doubted. The line to the players, however, still written in small script is much more legible as, particularly in the names of ‘Hemynge and Burbage’, the words are composed of individual separated letters. It is clear that the spelling is ‘Hemynge’ with no final ‘s’. The sum in Roman is less clear but distinguishable by comparing it to the same sum directly above in the previous line. The script that is interpreted as ‘a peece’ is not clear and could be debatable. This tiny word that begins after the line of the ‘j’ from above leading to the last four words ‘to buy them rings’ is even smaller but of neatly separated letters. The misspellings of Heminges and Condell betray the forger as the first has no ‘s’ and the third has no ‘o’, each ignored by anyone in the later centuries but not in 1616. This phrase stands out from the rest, not in a different style of writing but in the thinness of the pen lines and in the separated letters, possibly for clarity. However, the clarity and the missing ‘e’ from ‘ringes’ again betray the forger. If this phrase was originally ‘to buy him a ring’ the added downward stroke before ‘him’ would make it ‘them’ and the added ‘s’ pluralizes ‘ring’ as there is no ‘e’ as there is in other instances. If this fine penned phrase is an ‘original’ addition, it may have had the purpose of adding to the Roman sum for Anthony Nashe in the sentence above which would have made that sentence read: ‘to Anthonye Nashe gent xxvjs viijd to buy him ring, and to Mr John Nashe xxs in gold’. This ‘original’ addition would be compatible to the above bequest to both Tyler and Walker reading in the same amounts for the same purpose. If this addition were in the original, then the forged line to the players would have been inserted making use of the same amounts and the ‘possibly’ already written in ‘to buy him ring’ which is changed easily into ‘to buy them rings’ with no ‘e’. Was this line inserted by someone who knew these men or by someone who knew them only by seeing their names in print in later years ?

In the amendment, ‘in gold’ is crossed out and the sum of xxs is changed to xxvjs viijd which made it necessary for ‘in gold’ to be crossed out, the ‘new’ odd sum being impractical to be issued in gold as it would not have been for William Walker’s xxs as twenty shillings in gold is one gold sovereign. Since the blots and small insertions after ‘xx’ wind upwards over the line through ‘in gold’, the sum ‘xxs’ must have been blotted and the insertion added to imply ‘xxvjs’ at the time ‘in gold’ was struck out, but when was this done and by whom ?

No interlineal correction states ‘a peece to buy them ringes’ here. The Nashes both now receive the ‘ringe’ allotment without the stipulation of what the sums are for. Instead, there is written above: ‘and to my fellowes John Hemynge, Richard Burbage, and Henry Cundell, xxvjs viijd a peece to buy them rings’, not ‘ringes’. This further throws suspicion upon this insertion, as elsewhere the words are ‘ringes’ and ‘ringe’ which is not noticed by the forger.

Also, someone at a later date, being familiar with the spelling of the name in the Folio’s Dedication, as ‘Heminge’ may not have known that Heminges, himself, spelled his name with a ‘s’. Indeed, why was the name in the Folio spelled without an ‘s’ if Heminges is supposed to have been involved with the printing ? Why are instances of the name since 1623 spelled without a ‘s’? Is it because in the Dedication of the Folio of 1632, it is spelled without an ‘s’ even though it contained an ‘s’ in the ‘List of Players’ in the Folio of 1623 as well as in all other references to Heminges before 1623 and in his signature on the ‘Blackfriars mortgage’ ?

Where this line is found is the only place where a forger could have included the line with the players’ names. The content of the previous lines determined the amount each would receive and indicated a plausible purpose, the same sum and purpose as already stipulated to ‘Tyler’.

This short section of the will is the only section in which sums of money are consistently expressed in Roman numerals and not written out fully in English words as they are in the previous section. Had this section also been written out originally in English words, it would have been impossible to make revisions interlineally as is done here, by anyone, by a forger or by the originator of the will. Inserting sums of money in English words would have required too much space, but had there been only words and a forger had used Roman numerals, the contrast with the words would have caused instant suspicion of forgery.

Someone at a later date, not having seen his signature nor having seen his name in a printing made before 1623 could easily have attempted to give plausible authority to his forgery by copying the spelling of such ‘y’ words in the will as ‘lyfe, gyve, fyftie, tyme, and lymitted’ not noticing that all ‘ing’ words are spelled with an ‘i’.

The choice of Roman numerals throughout this one section made it possible for the revisions and particularly for the insertion of the line to ‘Burbage, Hemynge and Cundall’. If this ‘Burbage’ line is a forgery, it also casts into doubt the other revisions in this section that could have been fraudulently added to give plausibility to the necessary ‘Burbage’ line. Sadler’s added name is written in as ‘Hamlett’.

Today, a printed transcript of the will or a quotation of this bequest out of context masks that it is, at best, an added afterthought and, more probably, a forgery purposely added to establish an association with members of the Burbadge company that otherwise was totally missing from anything connected to William of Stratford.

Placing this interlineal addition made the three players seem as what they are, an afterthought, and as it was only possible to include three in the given space, it necessitated omitting other surviving members in favour of the famous ‘three’, the two whose names are in the later Folio, but more likely, the forger is of the 18th or 19th century when the names of the other players were forgotten.

In the printed edition of the play ‘Ever y Man in his Humour’, his name is spelled in the list of players as ‘Hemings’ and John, himself, made his own signature ‘Heminges’, not with a ‘y’ but with an ‘s’. Anyone who really knew him would know this.

Also, in the list of ‘Principal Comoedians’ in Jonson’s ‘Every Man’, Richard ‘Burbadge’ is spelled ‘ric. Burbage’ and Richard signed his name as ‘Burbadge’. Anyone close to him would have known this He is also listed in the First Folio of 1623 under ‘The names of the Principall Actors’ as ‘Burbage’, and Heminges is listed as ‘Hemmings’, but again, someone at a later date, familiar only with the later spelling would spell it ‘Burbage’, no other words suggesting the older spelling as did words of the older spellings with a ‘y’ suggest ‘Hemynge’. This interlineal addition, then, contains a ‘modern’ spelling for ‘Burbadge’ that he did not use and an ‘ancient’ spelling for Heminges that no one used.

So frequently do biographers describe Heminges and Condell as William’s ‘fellow actors’ or ‘his fellows’ that seeing the words ‘to my fellowes’ in the will seems quite natural whereas these words give the hint that is the most difficult to notice as it is ‘in plain sight’. It seems a jarring note that William would have the scrivener to write ‘and to my fellowes’ as this is an intimate friendly appellation not seen anywhere else in the will.

The word ‘fellow’ was used by ‘Heminge and Condell’ in the Dedication in the 1632 Folio, ‘to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive’ and this was picked up by many legend makers and it would be a tempting choice of words to a forger for inclusion however inappropriate as it is in the will where not even the word ‘friend’ is found. The use of the word ‘fellow’ in Heminges and Condell’s’ ‘so worthy a friend and fellow alive’ does not imply the same connotation that ‘To my fellowes’ in the will suggests.

No one in the family circle, much less William, could have substituted the misspelled name of a London play for the first name of his life long friend and neighbour after whom he named Hamnet, his dear, dead and only begotten son.

Although neither is so specific as to say ‘fellow actor’ or ‘To my fellow actors’, Heminges and Condell’s use does not even intimate that they were ‘joined through some common occupation’ or ‘belonging to the same class or group’ but the inserted ‘To my fellowes’ of the will does suggest that hitherto missing idea of partnership. The three players named are those three only who were best known by the literate public, the biographers and poets of the later decades and centuries, ‘Heminge and Condell’ as they are named in the Folio and Richard Burbadge as he was so many times referred to in poetry for years and so well regarded by nobility including the Earl of Pembroke. The names of the other two surviving company members at the time of the will, Nicholas Tooley and Cuthbert Burbadge, are not mentioned in the Willy’s Will but would have been equally well known to any member of the company. A forger would find no advantage in naming members unfamiliar to the general public in his time. No one was familiar with the names William Walker or Richard Tyler either, but forgers always relied on what was known.

The editor, 40 year old George Steevens (1736 1800), and the 25 year old scholar, Edmund Malone (1741 1812), went to trace signatures from it on September 24, 1776. There was leisurely opportunity around 1750 for tampering with the document, if not any time during those lost 131 years from 1616 when its travel to London from Stratford is unknown.

The existence of the will was completely unknown to the public until 1747 when the Reverend Joseph Green of Stratford ‘discovered’ it in the Prerogative Office at the Doctor’s Common in London. Although these additions were commented upon by 1760, the will was open for anyone to handle once its location was known and for 150 years, it was touched, traced and tattered both there and at Somerset House after 1861 until it was displayed under glass at the Public Record Office in 1962.

The legal terms are never softened for the oldest friend or the nearest relative. Why, then, would this particular phrase be used and only to the three who obviously were not on his mind during the writing of the body of the text. They were included only after those who were not family members and why would these extra unprecedented words be used where there is so little room to write them ? This phrase would be very important to the purpose of the forger which is to prove, indisputably, that this man is ‘the beloved Author, William Shake speare Bard of 36 Plays’. The three players inscribed into the Will are the forger’s downfall but most damning for the forger is that he wrote in only these three actors from the many in the Burbadge Company and the forger reveals therefore that these were added in the 18th or 19th century when the names of the other actors were long forgotten.

Evidence that this first page is the original page and that William did not have a previous first page revised to diminish the inheritance of his daughter Judith as so many infer, lies in the first item of the will. Judith is his first consideration. “Item, I gyve and bequeath unto my [sonne and] daughter, Judyth one hundred and fyftie poundes of lawfull English money”. The words ‘sonne and’ are crossed out but it cannot be considered that he had them excised through annoyance with either the wedding or Thomas Quiney. They are written in error and he had them deleted. If he had referred to Thomas, he would have had to write ‘my sonne in lawe’ as he had on page three for Dr John Hall. If he had any dissatisfaction with Thomas, he would not have had written ‘my sonne’ as he, of course, knew that Thomas had married Judith while writing this page in March.

They could not include information or names which would not have been known by those living at the turn into the 17th century but which those of the 19th century would not know and so the forgers betray themselves again by not including little known information at their time of writing.They could not invent names as this would surely give them away to scholars. The names in the will were not known to either scholars or the public until the will is discovered in 1747 and legitimate information regarding Stratford residents including William was not known until the middle of the 19th century.

William also bequeathed unto “saied daughter Judith one hundred and fyftie poundes more, if shee or anie issue of her bodie by lyvinge att thend of three yeares next ensueing the daie of the date of this my will”. The day and date are crucial to the execution of the terms of the will for Judith. In the interim, that sum as well as the first sum would gather interest between the time of his ‘diseas’ and the time of Judith receives the sums at the rate of ‘twoe shillings in the pound’.

The idea that the wedding was performed in haste, “The wedding was secret”, or that William did not know about it, all used to support the notion that this caused William to rewrite page one of the will, came from the date of the wedding, February 10th, during the time of the ecclesiastic ban on marriages from January 27th to April 7th, the time before Advent. A marriage could be performed only by special licence. William, himself, had to obtain special licence since Anne Hathwey was pregnant at the time of a similar ecclesiastical ban on marriages from December 2, 1583 to January 2, 1583 at that time before the year was ‘corrected’ to begin with the month of AlthoughJanuary.William received a licence on Nov 27, 1582, he could not be married before the December 2 as a ban had to be announced on the Sunday beforehand. William, however, obtained his licence in the ‘regular manner’, from the Bishop of Worcester. Thomas’ ‘irregular’ manner of obtaining his licence made the unholy difference as he had obtained his from the local vicar in Stratford and this caused him to be summoned to the Consistory Court at Worcester. This, we are supposed to believe, was enough the raise William’s wrath to change the will. Ironically, Thomas’ reason for marrying Judith during the banned months was not Williams’ reason for his own hasty marriage, as in Thomas’ case, Judith is not pregnant. Neither was it Thomas’ fault to be ordered before the Court as the vicar should have refused him and sent him to Worcester. It would be unfair of William to have held Thomas accountable for this. William must have been fully aware of the impending marriage beforehand as the wedding could not possibly have been secret. As ‘special licence’ meant that these would be two banns of marriage announced publicly instead of the usual three.

William knew this well enough from his own regrettable experience during his untutored youth.

Why, then, did Thomas Quiney pay so dearly for a marriage to be performed during a prohibited time when Judith was not pregnant ? Was it because Thomas knew that a Margaret Wheeler was pregnant and that he was responsible ? During those days, this was a most convenient way for a woman to press for a marriage, particularly if she were nearing thirty.

Why should he not pay the plagued licence fee, And marry immediately his lady love, Anne Whateley ?

Of trudging his way with a cumbersome load to the village of Temple Grafton near,

Why should he forego the fulfilment of the dream that fondly beckons, All for the foolish forgetfulness in those brief but fervent seconds ?

Never before has his lips so stilled into startled silence by a maiden’s form so fair, His limbs so fallen to helplessness, his eyes so fixed upon a face so far beyond compare That the buds of May turn pale beside her, the burning sun out rivalled by her shining hair.

Now in the nothing of cold November, He has no remembrance of why he allowed his youthful lust To betray himself in the heat of the moment in that tempting field of August, And to stray from the remembrance of that perfect day in far away May.

The two ruffian farm hands from the Shottery Hathwey farm With forty pounds in betrayal silver come to bring him grief and harm A fortune for a warrant to attest and sentence him too soon To a life of servitude for the lapse of an errant afternoon.

Now the shadow of unveiled knowledge of another Anne lies in his way, This unexpected shot to his all his plans out of the village of Shottery, An expectant Anne, what is her name ? Anne Hathwey ?

What a lady is Anne Whateley, and what a lady Anne Whateley !

This, of course, is speculation, but the reasoning comes from what is known and with more understanding of the nature of William than the legend of the Rewritten Will with its unfounded premise having no evidence whatever that William ‘altered his will drastically’, or ‘much reduced Judith’s expectation’. What would it profit William’s purposes to punish Judith, depriving her of rightful money or property, all for Thomas’ inferred affair with Mistress Wheeler ?

When in the languid spring time days of his callow and eighteenth year

Could William now reject young Thomas who is lost in the same sorry state of his bitter remembrance ? Would not William urge his own undone solution, for Thomas to marry Judith, she who is the love of his youth ? Then the scheming Margaret Wheeler would have no claim to Thomas. Might not William offer to arrange for him the special licence during the pre Advent ban, even speak with the local vicar across the way for a private dispensation without a price to pay ?

William meanders along the reluctant road in his dutiful but obedient chore

William long remembers now with the pain of deep regret The disastrous action taken with quick and dread dispatch.

And late in arriving at the appointed cottage, he listlessly raps at the opening door.

This lithesome lass is Anne, but this lass is a lady !

A man who is married is immune to the menace of an unwanted match.

Thomas may have quite trusted William’s arrangements as he felt no obligation to appear before the Consistory Court when summoned to Worcester. Why he and not the vicar ? When he does not appear, he is fined and excommunicated. Margaret Wheeler, no longer able to demand marriage, nevertheless makes known her accusation against Thomas who on the day after the will is dated, confesses in local court. He does not make public penance by being denounced in the church for three consecutive Sundays as ordered, but takes William’s example, he pays the fine of five shillings thereby depriving the parishioners of the pleasure of his public humiliation.

All of the non family inheritors are long time friends and the sons of friends in the environs of Stratford. Other than the rich man’s son, none of them receive anything but various sums of money or the specific sum to buy a remembrance ring. No personal belonging, a doublet or a cap and certainly not any literary manuscript, book, play, Quarto or a single sheet of verse is given to anyone. His godson, William Walker, receives, not a signet ring but twenty shillings, less than the price of a ring for remembrance. Of the man who confessed himself not as William’s godson but as his true son named William Davenant, there is not one word. Why should there be ? Wily Sir Wm. D. was also a story telling rogue. Beyond this small Stratford circle of friends from the many years past, only three of the five surviving members of a particular playhouse in London are added but they are added by whom ? That is it, no memento of special meaning, no legacy to a young apprentice actor, no ‘my best hat’ unlike players in the theatre who had gone before. William left nothing to anyone that had the slightest association to his ever having been anything but a lender of money. From his long London days, no single acquaintance or dear friend in that great city is mentioned in his will, no one receives five shillings, not a single parchment with a sonnet, no personalized quotation from a play to be treasured by a knight, a lord, a courtier or a parish priest, no sign of knowing anyone of fame or rank. No pewter cup to a humble wig-maker, nothing to be placed upon the shelf of the innkeeper where he supped and dined all of his days. No traded pamphlet with a poet, no jibing jest to Jonson, no pertinent pen or quill willed to an adoring admirer, no songs of sentiment, no flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar, no last letter of lament to all those lads who quaffed a tankard or two on a cold but well remembered night. To his near Stratford friends, no family crest passed on as the cherished symbol of his life, only little sums of money which were the true tokens of his long fulfilled dream.

The greatest inspired literature that William ever commanded is the finely worded dispensation of his real estate. His most tragic line is the repetitive 223 word sentence that begins ‘And alsoe all that message’ and ends with ‘William Shakspeare for ever’ (Shaks). By this legal drone of words, words, William desperately seeks to immortalize his amassed fortune of farms and fields, orchards and corn tithes by legislating them to ‘the fourth, fyfth, sixte and seaventh sonnes’ of his daughter, Susanna, who has no sons. This long, finely detailed sentence demonstrates Williams’ pre occupation with finding immortality for his fortune with at least one grandson. He spends a considerable quantity of ink and labour on the many unblemished lines, in itself unusual in this will, allotting all his ‘barns, stables, orchards, gardens, landes, tenementes’ to the wrong branch of the family tree. Ironically, the newly wedded ‘illiterate’ Judith will bear him not one but three grandsons whom he has not provided for in his will. The first boy, born that November of 1616, dies in infancy. The second son, Richard, is born in February of 1618 and lives 22 years; the third, Thomas, is born in January of 1620 and lives 19 years. Neither young man bore William an heir. The infant son inherits William’s name, not his ‘William’ name, but his family name. That first son of Judith and Thomas Quiney is first named ‘Shaxper’ !

calls that first L100 a “L100 dowry” interpreting the written in addition above ‘in discharge of her marriage porcion’ as meaning that the L100 would act as satisfying or meeting the obligation of supplying the money that a wife brings to her husband at marriage. However, a dowry does not go to the wife, Judith, but to the husband, Thomas, and the husband is to receive ‘landes awnsereable to’ or equal to ‘the porcion’ of L100 ‘by this my will gyven’. The dowry that Thomas receives is ‘landes’ and the marriage gift to Judith is L100. The ‘landes’ value is equal to the L100 which is not the dowry.

Another L50 would be paid to Judith if she relinquished her title to ‘one copyhold tenenmente with thappurrtenaunces lying and being in Stratford upon Avon’ which was the cottage on Chapel Street described in the will as ‘being parcel or holden of the mannour of Rowington’, Judith’s decision is not known. She was not compelled to hand over the title for L50 to her sister Susanna, and she would have been wise to hold onto the property as real estate was increasing in value and she would have the use of the cottage and ‘thappertenaunces’. When Anthony Burgess mentions this L150, he interprets it as “But she would not be entitled to touch this as capital; she must be satisfied with the interest on it”. (P251) Burgess implies that she would never be able to touch the capital but could collect the interest, but this waiting period was clearly to end on March 25, 1619, three years after the date on the will, if either she or any child of hers were living at that date. She or the child would be entitled, then, to receive the capital sum or the interest that would be paid ‘after the rate of twoe shillinges in the pound’.The conditions under which the L150 would be invested, ‘to be set out by my executours and overseers for the best benefitt for her and her issue and the stock not be paied unto her...but my will ys, that she shall have the consideracion’ the interest ‘yearlie paied unto her during her lief’ was only ‘soe long as she shalbe marryed and covert baron’ ! Judith was living three years after the date of the will with one son living, and so, being not barren, she was entitled to the capital.Rowse

It is fortunate that the ‘foremost authority on the Elizabethan Age’, A.L. Rowse, (‘He is our greatest living historian’ Sir Arthur Bryant) and author novelist Anthony Burgess were not executors of the Will. The ‘one hundred and fyftie poundes more’ was not for Judith’s children but for her, and it had only the one provision: ‘if shee or anie issue of her bodie be lyvinge att thend of three yeares next ensueing the daie of the date of this my will’. There is no mention in this that a similar sum must be given to her or her children by her husband for this request to be made. Have these biographers not viewed the will ?

THE INEXACTUTORS OF THE WILL

Biographer A.L. Rowse finds great new grains among the chaff of the will (‘S. the Man’ (1973)“ForP271)Judith: L100 dowry...another L150 for her children provided her husband settled an equal sum on her and them.”

Another item over on page two of the will provides that Judith’s husband Thomas could receive ‘the said clli’ shalbe paied to such husband....to his owne use’ only if ‘suche husband ...doe sufficientlie assure her and thissue of her bodie landes awnsereable to the porcion by this my will gyven unto her’. This is a condition of giving money to Thomas, not a condition of Judith receiving the L150, and it is ‘landes awnsereable to’ or equal to ‘the porcion’, and the only ‘porcion’ in the will is the one on page one, ‘one hundred poundes in discharge of her marriage porcion’, not L150.

The spelling of the word indicates that it is a late forgery.

There is no mention in the will of William owning any shares or stock investments in any company or building of a theatre. Of real estate holdings that the Stratford William bought and that documents have been found attesting to his ownership, all are mentioned in his will, the Henley Street properties to his sister, Joan Harte, and New Place to Susanna Hall, his daughter, as does the Blackfriars ‘tenemente’, as well as all other lands and farms ‘of Stratford upon Avon, Oldstratford, Bishopton and Welcome’. The cottage on Chapel Street is already in the possession of Judith, his other daughter. All documented and verified holdings area accounted for in this will but no investment shares in any theatre company or building. Some suppose that such shares were sold before his ‘retiring’ to Stratford, but no such documents exist, either in William’s possession or in the possession of any supposed buyer.

When an actor resigned or retired from a theatre company, he usually sold or gave his shares to another member. It is known that William Kempe and others did this, so biographers suppose that ‘William sold his shares upon leaving the company’ estimated at around 1609. However, there are no documents found to say that the Stratford William every bought, held or sold shares in any theatre as there is evidence for Kempe and others. Thomas Pope willed his holdings in the Globe and Curtain theatres to actors John Edmonds and Robert Gough. There is a document to suggest that a ‘William Shakspere’ was an ‘investor’ in the Swan Theatre of Francis Langley, the surety bond of William Gardiner, but the other people named in the bond are unknown and there seems to be no reason why any of those named were so named and not Langley as Langley was owner of the Swan. One name is that of a woman and it would be a single rarity if a woman were a shareholder or part owner of a theatre in the days of Elizabeth.

All those non family members who are mentioned anywhere in the will were all involved with William’s financial or legal affairs or in the buying of property or were related to those who were so ‘Williaminvolved.Raynoldes gent.’, included interlineally as an afterthought, or as a forged insertion, was a resident of Chapel Street, three houses from New Place, who ‘farmed’ William’s tithe acreage for him. William Raynoldes and his father, Thomas, were wealthy landholders whose house and farm contained possibly 15 or more servants. There is no mention anywhere that William Shaxper, or rather his wife, Anne, had any servants.

William left his sword to the volatile Thomas Combe from whose Uncle William he had purchased land. This Uncle William’s father was John Combe, the money lender on whom William patterned his own life, taking up the same occupation and cultivating as friends the same persons as John Combe had left sums of money in his will: ten pounds to Francis Collins, an overseer of Williams’ will, and twenty shillings to Henry Walker whose son, William, was William’s godson, born 16 October, 1608, who received a gold sovereign in his will. Henry Walker was an alderman and a mercer, a dealer in fine fabrics on High Street. Henry’s niece married Matthew Morris, a trustee to whom the Blackfriars ‘tenemente’ was transferred for him to manage for Susanna when she inherited it. Morris and his wife named their children, John and Susanna, after the Halls.

The paper that lists a ‘William Shakespeare’ as holding shares in the Blackfriars theatre building in 1599 is a proven forgery of the 19th century whether or not the forger’s purpose was to establish that ‘Shakespeare’ was a long time member and a share holder of the Burbadge company before 1593, the first year in which the name, ‘Shakespeare’, is associated with poetry.

15 CONTENTS & NON CONTENTS OF THE WILL

With no documentation that Stratford William Shaxper is the referred to ‘William Shake speare’ of the Quartos or the Folios, what, then, did the Stratford William do in London ?

‘Anthonye Nashe gent.’ of Welcome, where William held lands, was the father of 23 year old Thomas Nashe (at the time of the will) who in ten year’s time would marry William’s grand daughter, Elizabeth, when she would be 17, and they would live in Thomas’ fine house next door to New‘HamPlace.net

John Combe’s will also stipulated a large sum for an alabaster and marble tomb for himself as a recumbent effigy made by Gheerart Janssen whose son later made William’s monument and Combe’s tomb remains on the north side of the same church chancel. William’s will did not mention any allowance for his monument. Who paid for it ?

The wording of the will can put to rest another rumour, the one that William ‘died a papist’ recorded by the Reverend William Fulman who, doing so, revealed that he knew not where ‘his’ William was buried. This has no more foundation than the statements of the Rev John Ward who when taking up his duties as Vicar in Stratford seemed to have asked no questions of any of the residents nor to have thought to research the town records.

So many of the few legends originating in the following century after 1623 come from the notes of the clergymen who were seemingly compelled to jot down fragments of biographical history of someone from another age that they never knew except by rumour, gossip or imagined tales of the man they thought was responsible for the many plays with which they were familiar from the Folio whether or not they ever read them or had seen any stage performances of them that had been banned for the decades of the Commonwealth.

Two of those named in the will were part of the family of a close friend, one of whom married into his family.

Sadler’, a life long neighbour on High Street, was also the third witness to the will. ‘Thomas Russell’ and ‘Frauncis Collins’ were ‘overseers hereof’ and ‘Richard Tyler the elder’ was excised from the will. ‘Julyns Shawe’ the first witness, lived between the Thomas Nashe house and the ‘Raynoldes’ house on Chapel Street. A ‘John Robinson’ was the second witness. A ‘John Robinson’ is identified in the will as a renter of the Blackfriars property in London.Of these non family members, many close neighbours, all had long standing connections to William’s Stratford business or legal dealing and all are from the environs of Stratford. No one from London is mentioned other than the suspiciously inserted acting trio from the Globe.

He lived for a time as a lodger in the Mountjoy Silver Street house as he was a documented witness at the Bellott-Mountjoy court case. William was a money-lender as the letter from Richard Quiney attests and he may be the William that lived for a time in Great St. Helen’s Street off Bishopsgate, only a block or two from the Royal Exchange market where borrowers met money lenders to receive loans and to make their interest payments. Any of the countless signed agreements would be worthless when repayments were concluded accounting for the absence of records of William’s business transactions in London. Great St. Helen’s was also very near to the Leaden hall market, the dealing place for corn and other farm commodities where William could sell the grain from his farmlands. Buying and selling produce and money-lending could easily become a full time occupation, creditors needing to be on hand for any opportunity that happened by and for arranged meetings with other investors and grain traders.

‘First I commend my soule into the hands of God my maker, hoping assuredly’, etc. compares to the will’s ‘That ys to saye first I Comend my Soule into the handes of God my creator hoping & assuredlie beleeving’, etc.

Several of the Reverend’s statements that he does not elaborate on, can be readily dismissed as William’s will follows the general pattern if not the exact wordings both from the formula of the Church of England and from the standard form for Protestant wills from the handbook of William West called ‘Simboleographie’ (1905):

No newspaper reported the disappearance that February nor for the years either before or after 1900 and the newspaper’s ‘quotation’ about the incident ‘reprinted’ in the book cannot be traced. Yet none of these realities seem to deter the widely held belief that the incident did happen although no one had heard of any such event until the book was published in 1967. (‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’, Jean Lindsay)

The most famous and widely believed story was that these same circumstances had been experienced in 1893 by no less a person than Frederick Temple Hamilton Temple Blackwood, first Marquis of Dufferin and Ava.

A book written in 1967, although fiction, presents a story of how three women from a ladies’ school at Woodend in Australia disappeared without a trace while on a weekend picnic at Hanging Rock in February of the year 1900, and the book includes a ‘printout’ news item from a Melbourne paper about the incident. A motion picture exhibited in 1975 portrayed the details of the disappearance.Muchspeculation

The author was non committal when confronted with the glaring inconsistencies including the absence of any record of the disappearance and she had prefaced the book with ‘Whether... fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves’. Not all readers would have the facilities to research the Melbourne papers of 1900, the ‘Age’ and the ‘Argus’, or the Woodend ‘Star’ but the most easily checked item of the story is the date on which it was to have occurred. The annual picnic at which the women allegedly disappeared among the crags of Hanging Rock was to have taken place on Saturday, February 14th, St. Valentine’s Day, but in 1900, Valentine’s Day fell on a Wednesday. In this case, the story of three women being lost forever among the crags of a wilderness is a fascinating mystery, not unbelievable, but told with the names of people who had lived and with the names of areas and places and institutions that exist. Their use, however impossible chronologically as shown upon investigation, contributed to the story’s believability, not as a legend but as an historical occurrence. However, the total absence of any recorded comment or documented account in official records contemporary that day in 1900 does not give the story any credibility.Asecond ‘incident’, even more widely held as a true occurrence, was firmly believed for an entirely different reason. The story of a man or a woman receiving in a dream or in an imagined vision, a warning given by a strange looking man and then the person actually seeing that same man in an elevator or a bus that later crashed with all on board, has been the subject of a radio play in the ‘thirties’, and a motion picture in 1945, ‘Dead of Night’, and a short story by E.F. Benson, ‘The Room in the Tower’, but the tale has also been reported on several occasions as a reality.

Two incidents of pure invention, being accepted as being true during the 20th century, illustrate the possible reasons for their being widely and tenaciously held as reality even in the modern age of daily newspapers that presumably rely upon at least cursory investigation or confirmation for authenticity before public reporting.

has been forwarded to explain what may have happened, but although the book cited actual places and mentioned people by name who had lived and who had engaged in the stated trades, a researcher learned that the ladies’ school, Clyde College, was not founded until 1910 in a Melbourne suburb and did not relocate to Woodend until 1919.

UNFOUNDED LEGENDS OF THE 20TH CENTURY Robert J. Meyer

The story Dufferin told on those occasions was not, of course, about himself but a yarn that he enjoyed by amazing his friends with about a man who had stayed in Scotland’s Glamis Castle.

A version of the story was first printed in 1892 when the Rev Stainton Moses, the editor of the paper, ‘Light’, vouched for its unquestioned authenticity when publishing it with the recommendation that “It had been communicated to me by a personal friend and is both authentic and trustworthy”. The story reappeared in the same paper in a new version under a new editor in 1907 and was still presented as being authentic but now the story was to have occurred with an elevator in Chicago.

Lord Dufferin served in several diplomatic posts and while staying at a house in Ireland he had awakened one night in terror, and upon going outside, he saw a strange looking man carrying a coffin on his back. Ten years later, while waiting for an elevator at the Grand Hotel in Paris, he recognized the elevator attendant as the man he had seen ten years before in his dream.

How, then, did the Dufferin story ever see publication ? The reputation of each teller and re teller of the account prevented the slightest doubt from arising or the need for any routine verification of the events. These were the experiences of one no less than Lord Dufferin whose reputation was exceedingly unquestionable. He would hardly be the perpetrator of such a hoax and the story was given to the reputable astronomer Flammarion by the eminent psychologist de Maratray whose own wife was related to the family of Lord Dufferin. De Maratray had been told of the entire details personally by the distinguished diplomat and writer, Harold Nicholson, who was the living nephew of Lord Dufferin, and Nicholson said that he had heard the story from his uncle himself.Why,then, would Flammarion have any doubts, as it would never occur to him to question the story as that would be unthinkable. However, Flammarion could hardly have known much about the illustrious Lord if he was not aware that Dufferin had spent the years 18 to 18 as Governor General in Canada. Even if he had, he would have naturally assumed that Dufferin had been in Paris in 1893 on official business if not on holiday. It was true that Dufferin’s nephew, Nicholson, had related the story to de Maratray as being genuine. Did he also not know of his uncle’s duties in Canada in 1893, or did he also assume that Dufferin was in Paris on business. It was when he was a boy that Nicholson had heard his uncle tell the story as he had often done after dinner as a lark.

There had been a fatal elevator accident at the Grand Hotel but that occurred further back in 1878, and not in 1893 in a year when Lord Dufferin could not possibly have been in Paris as he was then representing the Queen in Canada as Governor-General.

Here was a well believed event again with no newspaper account of it at the time of 1893.

for this account were impeccable as it was first written by the French psychologist Monsieur R. de Maratray, who claimed to know of the true events as his wife was a relative of Lord Dufferin. De Maratray gave the full account to the French astronomer, Camille Flammarion who included it in his book, ‘Death and its Mystery’. The story enjoyed a broad audience and was eventually retold by several authors. However as large a following the tale had, one person in particular never heard of it, at least Lord Dufferin had not heard the story with himself as the prime witness, as this Dufferin story was not published until 1920 and Lord Dufferin had died in 1902.

Lord Dufferin refused to enter the elevator which, moments later, took the attendant and all passengers to their death at the bottom of the shaft. That was the story widely published and circulated.Thecredentials

The Disappearance at Hanging Rock story parallels the ‘S’ legend as told by the 20th century biographers. Today, 21st century biographers of ‘S’ do not rely solely upon the Rowe ‘Life’ but follow more closely to the way in which the story was constructed in ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ by using verified historical detail and known personages and intermingling them with statements that are invented but seem logical since they are so woven with what can be verified. The Author of the Folio Plays whose name was ‘William Shake speare’ is described as, ‘no doubt’, knowing the prominent people of the Queen’s Court, attending well documented functions, that he was referred to by the foremost poets in their works, was mentioned in documents found and now stored in London libraries, and in chronological order are related as being true about William of Stratford, all of which have nothing whatever to do with writing plays but are from authentic documents, legal papers and Town records concerning births and marriages and existing letters dealing with investments and business among friends.

The first statements about Dufferin’s experience in Paris and of William of Stratford being the author of the Folio Plays were first printed long after each man’s lifetime and so neither knew anything about the claim.

The Dufferin story parallels the ‘Shake speare’ legend as told by the original biographer Nicholas Rowe. In each case, the legend began as the hazy remembrance of a young boy, Dufferin’s nephew, Nicholson, and Shaxper’s ‘godson’ William Davenant who claimed to be the son of ‘Shake speare’ whom he knew as a young boy. Each man’s belief could be the mistaken assumption taken when each was a very young boy. Each man became a respected person of quality and accomplishment. Each told the story to other respected persons. The legends were repeated by recognized personages and finally found their way into print. Rowe, as did Flammarion, trusted his source as in both instances the person was a respected friend with a qualified reputation. Rowe relied upon Betterton as Flammarion trusted de Maratray. Both de Maratray and Betterton had received their information from someone as close to the subject of the story as possible, de Maratray from the subject’s nephew and Betterton from his subject’s ‘son’. As Flammarion was the noted astronomer, his account was retold and printed by others as being true. As Rowe was the Poet Laureate and a gifted scholar of literature, his ‘Life’ of ‘S’ published in his edition of the Plays was copied by subsequent editors and left mostly unchanged. Dr Samuel Johnson added to it his account of the horse holding story specifically because he had received it, as he notes, from a reliable source. Until Rowe’s edition and ‘Life’, no one had troubled themselves to gather any information on the author of the Folio Plays. It was assumed that the man was buried in the church at Stratford and no one questioned the possibility of the person entombed there under the floor of having the ability to write plays. No one searched any available records to see whether this man had formal education or any connection to the London theatre. Rowe’s ‘Life’ was upon what he credits Betterton for researching and several ‘rumours’ or anecdotes that were currently popular. Rowe’s skeletal biography was increased with only the reworking of old anecdotes with the former subjects substituted by Elizabethan names that were remembered a century or two later.

Biographies of the Victorian Age were augmented by ‘new discoveries’ later found to be forgeries. Some of these fraudulent items nevertheless continued to be included in 20th century biographies as recognized fact.

Another similarity of the ‘S’ legend to the Hanging Rock story is that neither is based upon authentic printed material written or originating at the time. Many of the statements in both cases can easily be discounted as being impossible chronologically as is the case with all of the forgeries concerning ‘S’ and many of the endless statements made by modern biographers.

Strangely, a man of the church figured in one of the versions of the ‘Dufferin’ tale although not in the Dufferin version. The Rev Moses accepted the story from a ‘trustworthy’ friend. Many of the statements about ‘S’ over the later years were begun in the writings of clergymen or were related to them ‘upon trusted authority’ so that they passed on statements without proof. The allegations were never investigated at the time and were unquestioned because the sources of information were ‘trustworthy’ people.

The lack of information about one who was considered England’s greatest poet was not a source of suspicion. By the end of the 17th century, the Elizabethan and Jacobean times were looked upon as quite distant, a time thought to be not as abundant in printed books and papers as it was assumed that commentary and records were either nonexistent or never well kept and that opinion lasted far into the 20th century and still is repeated in the 21st century.

The ‘Dufferin’ and ‘W.S.’ stories shared a similar ‘authentic’ source, a ‘close’ relative who also was very young at the time when the remembered events occurred. In the Dufferin case, the nephew had heard his uncle tell a story that he must have believed was true not being aware that his uncle’s storytelling was to see the reaction of his audience. Even then, the nephew related an entirely different version that involved his uncle and in other locales with re invented dates.

Another source often referred to is a memo that the Rev Ward made to himself of ‘things to do’, one of which was to visit William’s daughter, Judith, late in her life and another reminder to brush up on his reading of Shake speare’s works before talking with her, but he never recorded whether he ever went to see her. Nothing that he relates is anything other than the general rumours that he could have heard beforehand and he reports nothing about William that only Judith could have told him. It would have been of the greatest interest if Ward had visited Judith and had asked her about her father, but what would he have asked ? He hardly knew anything about the Plays of the First Folio and he may have assumed that Judith would know what he was talking about. Would she have comprehended his assumption and would her denials of any understanding of his implications or of any knowledge of the ‘great poet’ be dismissed as senility ?

Yet, modern biographers depend heavily on extracted phrases from Aubrey’s ‘Brief Lives’ to bolster their legends of ‘S’ and quite often excuse Rowe’s opinion of Aubrey as personal animosity spurred by the suits that he had to endure because of Aubrey’s lack of respect for the truth. As with the complete and proven forgeries, the ‘Brief Lives’ relating to ‘S’ can be seen as unreliable and as outright gossip or invented exploits without logic, but biographers not only continue to include these anecdotes and obvious errors but have extended credibility by oftquoting a scrap of memoranda that even Aubrey completely ignored in writing his book. How desperate the biographers have been is shown by their quoting it as authentic information taken down in personal interviews with people that are only jottings on a memorandum by Aubrey of people and things to inquire about that are all fully crossed out on the page with pen.

Although the short biography of ‘William Shakespear’ written by John Aubrey as part of his book ‘Brief Lives’, was written before 1700, not one of its contents was printed until 1898. The author had a poor reputation as recorder of factual biography. Rowe, who is quoted as saying that Aubrey was ‘maggotie headed’, had been sued for printing material that was reported to him by Aubrey as being factual.

In the modern story of Dufferin, once Flammarion’s book was published, a reporter journalist, Paul Heuge, of the Paris magazine, ‘L’Opinion’, quickly investigated and exposed that Flammarion had published this and many other stories that were unsubstantiated. Yet, once this expose’ was public, Flammarion did nothing to disclaim the story but continued to circulate the book, and the proof of the story’s untruth became the information that was soon ignored and forgotten, not the false story which was repeated and retold. So let it be with ‘W.S’. Many anecdotes and statements were written in the 19th and 20th centuries about ‘W.S’ that were invented and presented as truth, along with a sizeable list of outright forgeries that even when revealed as such continued to be retold in print throughout the 20th century.Equally today, the foremost defence of these invented tales has been the reputation of the teller, or of the one who purportedly made the claim or whose words were interpreted at a later time to have said that the man known as William Shaxper owning lands in Stratford in 1616 was actually the man who wrote the Plays published in the First Folio of 1623, but no one in the 17th century stated that they knew this, but rather, that this was presumed as each writer reported what the former had implied and any journey to Stratford proved nothing for the occasional but rare traveller for he was not looking for proof but was only visiting the town where he understood ‘the Great Poet’ was buried.

All accounts of any enquiry, and few they are, has given scant information about Shaxper and never anything that would associate that man with plays or writing. Nicholas Rowe’s brief history was the first printed account and he did not visit Stratford or make any enquiry but set down only rumours and legends current in London at the time of 1700. Rowe’s account was repeated by each biographer and editor without question or further research.

In the ‘W.S.’ case, Davenant was the storyteller who, as a theatre impresario, gave his audiences the impression that he was the son of ‘S’ without making a positive statement or explaining any circumstances. Davenant’s knowledge of his ‘father’ was either a remembrance as a very young boy or what he had been told at a later time. There is no way of knowing what that information contained. He may have been told only the man’s name at the time, or he may have known from his parents exactly who the yearly or occasional visitor was, Master William Shaxper, and why he was visiting at the Inn, that he was a man of property from London on his way to attend to his estates in Stratford. He may have been told: “Master Shaxper is your god father from London on his way home to Stratford.”

His inference that ‘William Shake speare’ was his godfather may have been a later inspiration to better his own image as a poet and playwright. It was Davenant who, after the long theatre hiatus following the Civil War when theatres were banished, introduced a few of the Folio Plays to London again taking full advantage of his intimated association with the mysterious author of whom very few knew the slightest thing. The audience’s only connection with the author of these glorious plays that they had never witnessed before was with the producer of these plays himself. Davenant was promoting both his ‘father’s’ plays and his own, and he kept the enticing mystery alive, but left behind no information about the author. He may have chosen to associate the name of the man who visited his father’s inn at Oxon with the name that is credited in the First Folio and that he was now making famous in London, that tempting association with the man whom he could now profess openly as his ‘father’ being profitable to him now as a man of the theatre.

No other contemporary of note has been associated with the name and the most probable reason for this is that even the learned writers of later years knew little or nothing of anyone else in the Elizabethan-Jacobean theatre. These four names were the most repeated after 1623 as Jonson’s plays continued to be performed. Richard Burbadge was the most talked about actor after his death and the names of Heminges and Condell were there to be seen in the current edition of the Folio, and their names are usually found in later references as a pair. This indicates more the limited knowledge of the storyteller who engaged in the pastime of writing about the fascinating famous person, the ‘great poet’. Not knowing the names of the other actors of the time, they relied upon stories that involved Richard Burbadge whose reputation had survived through the century and upon the two whose names could be read in the Folio. Many storytellers further demonstrated their lack of knowledge of the long by gone era by introducing invented relatives for William and with associations to people that were chronologically impossible.

If there had been interviews with Stratford citizens during the late 17th century, there would have been no significant information that anyone would have known about this secretive person and there was nothing of any supposed ‘fame’ in London in any capacity. No one in Stratford informed any passer by of any significant details of the man’s life not even about the large house where he lived in the centre of town or of his gaudy replica installed upon the church wall. Only invented legends were added to the void of information, anecdotes that linked the name on the Folio with well known and documented people of the time. Only four contemporary actors were ever associated with William in anecdotes, Jonson, Richard Burbadge, Heminges and Condell.

Ben Jonson made jest of those people who ‘bought’ coats of arms to call themselves ‘gentlemen’ but there is nothing to say that Jonson therefore knew and had William of Stratford in mind when writing this into a play. As soon as biographers learned a new reality about William of Stratford, they often would write an anecdote bringing two unrelated pieces of information together assuming that Jonson or whoever would have known what had been found only through deliberate research in the 19th century. Nothing worthwhile was revealed in any anecdotes before legitimate research and after research the ‘anecdotes’ attributed to early writers were contrived to fit the newly found reality.

Biographies written today often assume that the people in London and Stratford in 1600 were fully aware of the few bits of information that has taken years of painstaking research to gather from obscure sources only in the past century and a half. Where is there any evidence that any noted person of London in the first half of the 17th century, directly after the printing of the First Folio in 1623, knew any particulars of any of William’s Stratford family or even their names ? All of his personal history including the application for the coat-of-arms was not known until the mid 18th century. Samuel Johnson and his fellows knew nothing of William of Stratford or of his relations as they had only what was reprinted from Nicholas Rowe’s false suppositions.

What lay behind his heavy lidded eyes was ever a mystery. As a youth they had poured out a torrent of tears when he was made a forsaken prisoner, but he cavalierly imprisoned Walter Ralegh without regret. Before they could see, those eyes had witnessed blood and murder and he could never ever behold violence, yet he ordered Ralegh’s execution but would not look upon it. His eyes never betrayed what lay behind, showing no emotion, revealing no heart cold or passionate, asking that his mother’s life be spared but inquiring her emissary nothing about her, neither of her health, nor of the way she is treated’, his eyes reflecting bleakness only, as if waiting impassively waiting with infinite patience in a little room, told of his mother’s beheading, impassive still, waiting …for a time. His eyes divulging nothing but the ink from his pen confessed… “My pen or pity cannot write, my hair for horror stands”.

THE UNSEEN WITNESS Robert J. Meyer

When in the hushed room, Elizabeth the Queen finally pined away ‘easily like a ripe apple from a tree’, James in Holyrood waited, then he rose after the whisper in his ear, now his time had come to emerge from his Scottish cocoon ‘as a son and righteous heir of England’ with all peace and calmness to take his place on the cold throne of Elisabeth as the revenging James the First of all

Now her son, James, travelled the same course never to return but his procession rode to a different tune. Men of rank lost all decorum to rush northward to meet their new King, and each would fawn on him and hug him hard, scraping at his feeble feet to be anointed with any high office, to be remembered as one of his favoured few. His unsure feet needed barely to touch the ground and his body would be borne on the wave of exultation to banqueting halls to indulge in insatiate goring and saturating, imbibing beyond even his experienced capacity. Everywhere his gibbering gift of gab was greeted by rapt listeners with ears bent in adulation of his every jest, the same ‘jeasts’ that had sent his countrymen to sleep.

into her own kingdom of Scotland, no one of rank came forth to greet her. When she crossed the Firth of Forth in her escape into England, she would ride at a gallop but sleep unto the ground, unsure of who would be a foe or if ever she would find a friend.

Another witness still be privy to the murder pf Riccio. This witness, present but helpless that night in the chamber of Holyrood, felt the quiet of the room turn to terror, heard the great table crashing, the screams of the women, felt the constricting agony of fear, violent anger in unseen voices, staring eyes in horror, and inches away from his ear, the groaning thrust of steel into Riccio’s flesh, blindly sensing he smell of rushing blood, all fed to him, this hapless witness, through the eyes and blood of his mother Mary, the whole ghastly scene stamped forever locked into the memory of the infant James who emerged into a man somewhat Gloster like for frail nature had foresworn him in his mother’s womb, his shoulders broad but thin, rickety legs bent, his walk an uneven gait with one out-turned foot. A creature of grave humour but wry, of clever wit but cunning and crafty. Detesting shows of anger, he would himself display his own anger or else he would ‘not wear a lion’ in is arms but ‘rather a sheep’. Motherless as an infant, he starved for affection, yet he affected lasting hatred in his own son.

WhenEngland.Marystepped

He remembered what was said of his young imprisoned tears… “better that bairns should weep than bearded men”. Now, red bearded, he would weep no more. Nothing would swerve him from that firm resolve known only to himself alone.

The triumphal journey took its time. James would be sure that the man who felled the ax upon his mother would be well within his grave and perhaps forgotten by now, as it seemed there could be no noble now left in London as all were ushering him form fete to feast while he knighted them at every meal. Two Englishmen he met on the way, he did not dub with sword to the shoulder. The first, a pickpocket, a common cut purse, whose fellows teemed the streets of London, James had hanged on the spot without benefit of trial of English Common Law justice, a gentle reminder that rules of the new ruler would be different ‘the noo’. Some of the knights mewled and whined at his severity and celerity, but Sir John Harington asked, quite out of earshot of the King, “If the new King hangs a man before he is tried, will he then try a man before he had offended ?”

Instead, Ralegh travelled to Windsor to accompany the King on a hunt. Each time King James looked on him, the comparison between the two grew in King James’ mind. The King was only thirty six; why was Ralegh a man of greater bearing and attraction at nearly fifty ? The King was ungainly, slovenly and indelicate, so why should Ralegh wear expensive clothes in the finest fashion and not look tawdry ? The King did not invite Ralegh out to hunt. Rather Robert Cecil had bade him come to Windsor on that pretext and then Cecil bade him further to come to the Privy Council for a question or two.

His answer came quickly when James met the next Englishmen…the one knight who had waited for his Queen to actually die before making his journey of homage to meet the King. James greeted him with “Rawly, Rawly, and rawly ha’e I heard of thee, mon !”, but Walter Ralegh parried that thrust with silence. James beckoned again saying that he may have to fight for the crown. Ralegh replied, “Would to God you had ! Then your Majesty would have known your friends from your foes”. James had professed himself in banqueting to all the rout and Ralegh should have held him dangerous for within a month he knew he had lost the duel. The fatal stab came from behind. The man who scandalized him was a friend and co investor in venturous enterprises, the son of William Cecil, Robert who had poisoned him in the King’s eyes. Ralegh would have lain the West Indies at James’ feet only to be called now a warlock and a warmonger. He was no longer the Captain of the Guard. He was ordered to leave his Durham House that he had just provisioned for 40 persons and 20 horses, all a cutting blow which he felt deeply.“To cast out all my hay and oats into the streets at an hour’s notice and to remove my family and stuff in fourteen days after, is such a severe expulsion” Among his ‘stuff’ was his extensive library of books.

When confronted with the proposition that Christopher Marlowe was not stabbed to death but went into anonymous seclusion because his life was in constant danger, the Professor expressed impatience, saying that Marlowe, like Francis Drake or Ralegh, was an internationally known and respected person with aa reputation that would welcome him into any country on the continent that he pleased to enter, allowing him free and untrammelled liberty to continue to write plays or express himself in print. Why then were so many illustrious Englishmen imprisoned or put to the block for not one had chosen to escape to write again ? Marlowe had only a few friends, some very influential, yet limited in their prestige under William Cecil. Ralegh has wealth, great estates in Ireland, compatriots by the hundreds in the West |Country. Sailors would follow him to the ends of the earth, yet he did nothing to escape. He could have set up a colony in the New World or lived as a King of Pirates in the Indies. He joined no conspiracy offered o him. No plot of treason tempted him.

The Burbadge company of players that had been known first as ‘Lord Strange, his servants’, then briefly as ‘Lord Derby, his servants’ then the players were taken over by the Lord Chamberlain. One of the first acts of James that spring was to take these players under his own patronage as the ‘The King’s Men’ and as such, each member was fitted with a livery of the Royal red cloth and all became ‘Officers of the Royal Household’ as ‘Grooms of the Chamber’. These dozen men would be required at particular official functions, the first of which to be in the procession of the King’s Reception into London. Learning of this procession in which the King’s Men engaged, biographers of the nineteenth century assumed that their ‘William Shakespeare’ was an actor in this company of players and therefore they described him as marching in this procession, as one biographer, A.L. Rowse, says, “One can imagine him there”, but who is one imagining ? …the slim bearded man with the gold ring in is ear of the oil painting claimed without reason to be the heavy set ‘prosperous butcher like’ form fixed upon the wall of Stratford’s Trinity Church who would have required four and a half yards of scarlet cloth, and just what can one imagine other than him strolling along with little Burbadge and the others ?

Deprived of his house and honoured position by the King, insulted with indignities, offended and affronted to his face by the King, why would Cecil and the Council believe that Ralegh was not instigating insurrection against this King ? Rumours and gossip locked him into the Tower as the ‘Spider of Hell’. The King’s son, Prince Henry, honoured Ralegh as the embodiment of everything that was noble and fine in the Elizabethan Age. The best from Ralegh was yet to come. The worst of James was just beginning. Christopher Marlowe had often revealed to his fellow dramatists that his interest lay in going to Scotland, that he would doubtless find greater empathy for his work in the Court of young James than he has felt in London.

‘The Royal Coronation, postponed until March due to the current plague, was the first in the memory of most citizens, and the most festive ever known by any. All the great dramatists were commissioned to write masques and pageants Daniel Dekker, Drayton, Webster and Ben Jonson as the biographer imagines, “all the dramatists but Shakespeare who had other things to do…who was too busy.” What ‘other things’ is it that ‘one can imagine him doing’ ? It would be most likely the true Stratford man would be collecting grain tithes in Bishopton or lending money at Leadenhall Market, and this is in 1604 when he would be at his Mugle Street room in the attic using his charm in convincing Stephen Belott to marry his landlord’s’ daughter as the true Shaxper of Stratford is recorded as doing. In the biographer’s imagination he is ‘much too busy to write a play’, which they claim to be his forte, and far busier than Ben Jonson who turned out masques for every occasion but even Ben cannot be too busy to heel, get into line and dutifully walk along the procession route on Coronation Day. Biographers must then imagine him busy again during that summer when all six bearded plenipotentiaries from Spain came with full power to confer with the five English delegates and to authorize Spanish Peace at the Somerset House Conference. He must then be ‘imagined’ among his ‘fellowes’, the dozen or so King’s Men, as they were back on duty again in full livery on this momentous occasion. The King’s Men were throughout the negotiations, ‘busy in waiting in an ante room’ and ‘in waiting’ still while Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger painted the portrait of the six Spanish Flemish delegates respectfully seated across the tapestry covered table from the noble English Earls, grey bearded Thomas Sackville (Dorset), and Charles Howard (Nottingham), clean shaven Charles Blount (Devonshire) and goateed Henry Howard and in the foreground, Robert Cecil, Ralegh’s friendly foe, Henry Howard’s face looking most like the man in the Chandos portrait, passed off by biographers as the phantasmal ‘Shakespeare’.

Some 19th century biographers stress that the arts were not well served by the brusque indecorous James and his ‘air-headed Anne’, possibly to bolster their idealized view of the superiority of Elizabethan times, but it was James who brought Inigo Jones from his brother in law’s Court in Denmark to collaborate with Ben Jonson in that fall of 1604 in creating the fabulous costumes and set designs for ‘The Masque of Blackness’ and he masques of Jonson and Jones continued for more than ten years, with the Masque of the Queene’s (1609) in which Queen Anne played the role of Bel Anna, the Queen of the Ocean, and ‘Oberon’ (1611) in which Prince Henry played the title role. In 1615 Inigo Jones was made ‘Surveyor to the Crown’ and he began construction of the Banqueting Hall, the only remaining portion of the original Whitehall for the ceiling of which Rubens in Europe created a study for the King. From 1607 to 1611, James’ new ‘Office of Works’ spent 75,000 pounds. Among the artists were Isaac Oliver and Nicholas Hilliard who painted miniatures of members of the Royal Family. John de Critz painted the portraits of Robert Cecil, James I (1605) Arabella Stuart, Darnley’s brother Charles’s daughter, described the condition of the Court where ladies lolled about under the tables in decks awash display when she spoke of the masque where the figure of Hope was too sotted to speak and Faith had already abandoned the room to bend over the rails outside. Arabella said of this presentation of the masque in ‘this most ridiculous world’, “When I came to Court, they were as highly in request as ever cracking nuts was”. This masque was produced for the honour of King James’ visiting brother in law, King Christian IV of Denmark. This was an event for which entertainment was hurriedly sought and no new play could be found but Burbadge came around to suggest that “for wit and mirth” the old “Love’s Labore Lost’ would amuse the Queen. King James, however, would be, by the play’s end, in his usual state of nodding and bobbing.

Marlowe’s supposition proved to be correct. All the drama companies fared better by far in the Court of King James The Burbadge Players were to appear for Royal performances at an average of 13-a- year for the following ten years, a four-fold increase from their annual average of three a year performances for the Elizabethan years, but the Burbadge King’s Men was only one company. The company that Marlowe had written for, the Admiral’s Men, was taken under the Royal patronage of Henry Prince of Wales, while the Queen, Anne of Denmark, became the patron of Worcester’s Men.

Groups of the oppressed looked for merciful changes now that James was setting out new rules for he had written of ‘his plans’ in the book, ‘The Trew Law’, and again in his “Basilekon Doron’ on sale in England only days after Elizabeth’s demise as the much snapped up seller by ‘Pawle’s door’ in which he stated that “before parliaments existed, Kings existed to make laws as Kings were the breathing images of God”.

James called together the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 so that all could speak the grievances on their minds, thankful that he was brought “into the promised land” where beliefs were ‘purely professed’ among ‘grave, learned and reverend men’. The English Puritans asked for some relief from present pressures. James answered that “He saw yet no cause so much to alter and change anything’. By the Conference’s end, they saw their hopes dashed when King James announced, “I will harry them out of the land”. Now the Catholics wished to hear moderation and they heard it when James said that it was contrary to his feelings “that the blood of any man shall be shed for diversity of opinion” in what he believes. This was not what Robert Cecil was wont to hear and so he further repressed those who had looked for a more just and gentle hand over them and who would honour the King.

More hopes deferred, more hearts made sick by the sterner measures, “the spurs that set those gentlemen upon that furious and firey course”, said the Jesuit John Gerard.

TheHistory:government decree by King James but out of the mouth of Robert Cecil announces the Legend. “Hear ye ! Several treasonous traitors have plotted to destroy the soul and body of his gracious Majesty James the First of this realm, this demi paradise, this England by their nefarious and unholy scheme to cache a great quantity of gunpowder into a crypt in a room beneath the Hall of the Parliament where His Majesty and his Lords sat innocently while conducing dutifully the affairs of State. One of the blackguards was taken in the act of preparing to ignite that odious, offensive and abhorrent gunpowder, and so to have blown up all at a clap, if God out of his Mercy and just Revenge against so great an Abomination had not destined it to be discovered, though very miraculously!”

Graphic illustrations were drawn and published for all to witness with their own eyes how while London went about its daily business, the King and his nobles sat above in the Royal chambers while there below in the cellar the plotters took fire in hand to blow all apart with more than 50 visible barrels of gun powder. No need for further witnesses. They had seen the blasphemy ! Swift retaliation had already been ordered !

‘Those gentlemen’ were indeed gentlemen of honour who had come together in common resolve to right the wrongs of many gathering in taverns in town and in the old Clopton House on the fringe of the farm lands of William Shaxper of Stratford, there driven to acknowledge at last that their only remaining resort was by fire and fury. These meetings among those prosperous gentlemen, most in their earl y thirties, resulted in the most famous conspiracy in English history, known then as the ‘Powder Treason’ but remembered by the children’s chant: “Please to remember the fifth of November, Gunpowder, treason and plot !”, celebrated each year with burning effigies to keep the legend alive and to cement unquestioning belief in the Official Story which like the rhyme belongs to the nursery book of a grim fairly tales. The story divides Legend from

This ‘Gunpowder Plot’, the infamous charade that was bruited about as a villainous attempt to kill the King, has been claimed to be an influence in the writing of the play, ‘Macbeth’, which is a conspiracy of two people to murder the King and his servants in their night clothes as a man called Darnley was murdered with his servant. Macbeth was the first known performance of ‘that Scottish play’ was in1606, but no one knows positively when any of the Folio Plays were actually written. The dates now claimed are whatever the particular ‘expert’ saw in the play as a reference to a current event. The gate keeper speaks about ‘’equivocators’, therefore the Author chose the Gunpowder Plot after November 5th, , 1605. Marry, let us be more specific after March 28, 1606, the date of the trial of Father Garny for his implication in the Plot, because the ‘Gate keeper’ says, “Here’s an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale” the scales of Justice ? Tarry, for the gate keeper added “who committed treason, yet could not equivocate to heaven”, so the Author must have waited to write this passage until May 3, 1606, the date when Father Garnet, after he “fell into a large Discourse of defending Equivocators” was hanged ! ‘Nay’, says another ‘expert, Macbeth was written earlier in 1599 as ‘Shakespeare’ knowing how James felt, would never dare to write a play approving a rebellion against a reigning King, as if Elizabeth felt any differently in 1599 when Essex was fomenting rebellion and she sent him to the block and as if King James would care when the play was written if it were an affront to him.

Upon the King ! Let our sins lay upon the King ! James was a subconscious witness to the murder of Riccio and although he slept fitfully in in his rocking crib at Holyrood whilst his father Darnley was cruelly suffocated at the edge of town, these two merciless murders had molded his mood of mind every moment of his life as did the tearing away of his mother who never cradled him in her arms again, and who lived in total absence from him, but remained constantly with him in his mind.

Another expert disagreed. Dover Wilson considered Macbeth to be written in 1601 as he saw in it an allusion to the Gowrie conspiracy of 1600, yet an anonymous play called ‘Gowrie’ was performed by the Burbadge company in 1604 so ‘Macbeth’, also an anonymous play, could have been written at some other time. Most of this ‘dating’ occurred in the Victorian Age, that wildly romantic era that looked back on the Elizabethan times with fascination as an inspiration for fanciful portraits and poetic descriptions of that era’s dramatic events. The experts calculated their varying dates from obscure references to events that they had recently learned as if the Author, whoever that was, would say, “Time to write Loves Labors Lost about people in France since Ralegh is now in Royal displeasure but Holinshed’s Macbeth must wait for a theatrical adaptation until our future King is threatened with gunpowder or some such calamity and that tale of ancient Lear I shall defer until my mood is right when deep sorrow o’er takes me, should , mayhap, frail Hamlet die, ….or did she name him Hamnet ? Gadzooks, I cannot make another error as when I placed those London pawnbrokers, Guildenstern and |Rozenkranz, in the wrong play when they would have been more apropos companions of Snout and Starveling than as old friends to one so bent upon vengeful killing of the King !”

VENUS AND LUCRECE Robert J. Meyer

Since this was the time of the first flowering of English poetry in the English language, the subjects of poems were ‘classic’ since almost the entire education in Free School and University was the study of Latin writers in Latin. The dictionary meaning of English words were explained in Latin and the legends of Greece were known through texts in Latin

The long poem, ‘Venus and Adonis’ appeared in 1593, and introduced for the first time in London the name ‘William Shakespeare’ of whom no one has left any reference in any form before that date. The book was registered for printing on the 18th of April but published for sale later in the year. The Dedication that was ‘assigned’ to the name ‘William Shakespeare’ claimed that the poem was the author’s ‘first heir of my invention’ and promised ‘some graver labour’, a poem to come. This appears to infer that this future poem must have been already completed, or at least developed to the extent that the promise could be made with some surety. Two fully developed long poems, then, were the first introduction of ‘W. S.’ to London as an author in the medium of poetry that never again appeared under that name before 1616 nor has there ever been any other such long poem credited to that name

In the ‘Stratford Edition’ of ‘Venus and Adonis’, 1950, the author of the ‘Introduction’ explains that somewhere in the Middle Ages, the story as told by Ovid and others was modified to have Adonis insensitive to the charms of Venus, and that ‘the Author’ may not have known any other version of the myth, yet he says that ‘the Author’ ‘seems to have used the original’ Latin Ovid as well as an English translation by Arthur Golding that was available to everyone as early as 1567, that the Author ‘owed little to the original’ as he fills “in with pictures as of the horse and hunted hare, and with a love of the woods and of outdoor life, drawn entirely from his own experience and fancy”, alluding to his life at Stratford, but the bucolic scene was the experience of all of the poets and of none more so than Marlowe with his life at Canterbury.

The subjects of these two poems were not original but related to figures found in ancient poetry that were fully known to students of classical literature, themes that had been translated and essayed by several English poets. Although the poems have been hailed in later centuries as being like no other in their style in the ‘lifetime of William’, meaning William of Stratford The only instances of the name being connected to literature are the eight plays in Quartos in which the name is stated as being the author of that Play, some of which are not the version later printed in the First Folio. The printing of a book of poetry by several poets was published crediting that name as author exactly as it was printed in ‘Loues Labore Lost’ from which three short poems were included in the book of poems, ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’. All other references concerned these two long poems. That the subject of ‘Venus and Adonis’ was well known to poets of those years is evident in the number of narrative poems published on that subject. The original was from Ovid, the very familiar Romance poet from University days as Oxford or Cambridge and a popular source for translations.Thereare no mentions of ‘bad’ copies of ‘Venus and Adonis’ as there are with many of the early Plays. There are no ‘versions’ that differ widely, no footnotes explaining that certain words were found to be in other forms in other editions, and no mention that printed errors abound in a particular edition in either ‘Venus and Adonis’ or ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ as there are with Plays.

The subject of ‘Venus and Adonis’ was not original but had been the subject of many published authors familiar with Ovid.

Lodge’s ‘Glaucus and Silla’, 1590, has a storyline from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. Constable’s ‘The Shepherd’s Song of Venus and Adonis’, published in 1600, probably belongs to an earlier date than ‘Venus and Adonis’. Chapman’s ‘Ovid’s Banquet of Sense’ and Drayton’s ‘Endymion and Phoebe’ originate in Ovid. Christopher Marlowe had left his masterful ‘Hero and Leander’ unfinished and Chapman completed it. The tone of these earlier ‘Venus and Adonis’ poems and some of the later poems ranged from Spenser’s sacred to Marlowe’s profane. The only aspects that ‘Venus and Adonis’ seemed to have in ‘originality’ were the plethora of purple passages and the lingering longer over an incident by filling it with outdoor scenery as Lodge had done before. The other aspect was its eroticism that was parodied in 1601 in ‘Return from Parnassus’, the Cambridge sophomore play, and extolled in John Weever’s 1599 verses, ‘Ad Gulielmum Shakespeare’ wherein he refers to ‘fire hot Venus’, ‘lust stung Tarquin’ and ‘Rose cheeked Adonis’ all of which he credits to ‘Honie tongued Shakespeare’, the name on the Dedication page of the two long poems. Many biographers quote these references as proof that the university men knew the man but they knew the name only as the name on the poems’ title page.

The author of the Introduction to ‘Venus and Adonis, Stratford Edition’, says: “The Latin quotations from Ovid’s Amores on the title page would lead the reader to think Shakespeare knew his Ovid”. Title pages were the domain of the publisher and the printer with his seal and along with the wording of the information and the arrangement of the title, illustrative motifs and the inclusion of the Latin words of Ovid would be to the discretion of those other than the author.

Several books were used as source material for the writing of ‘Venus and Adonis’ alone, yet no books have ever been mentioned as being in the possession of William of Stratford by friend or relative living at New Place or by any other source. This one person, who for 400 years has been rated with Homer and the Bible, his biographers would have all to believe, was the only writer among many English poets writing on the same general topics and themes between 1585 and 1616 who would not keep his books or any writings finished or unfinished, yet William of Stratford lived his later life among close and interested relatives who did respect and collect books. Unlike Robert Greene who possibly died in the care of a loving woman but who had possibly neither the incentive nor the understanding of the value of his manuscripts, William of Stratford died in the care of his son in law and physician, Dr Hall, who had inherited a sizable library from his father and who bequeathed his entire collection of books and papers to his son in law who had some of the papers published. William of Stratford is the only person imagined to have written the Plays before mid 1800. The person who wrote at least some of the Plays must have had a most pressing reason for writing anonymously, and the most probable reason was the ultimate reason, to stay alive and particularly to stay alive in order to write plays. To deprive an enthusiastic writer from writing would give him little satisfaction only to exist, and it is better to write anonymously than to write not atToall.read any biography of ‘W. S.’ by A. L. Rowse as the first introduction to him, there would be no reason to believe other than William of Stratford was the most marvellous and gentle person whose genius was so absolute and natural that he wrote with such complete ease and alacritous speed that he seemed never to have any problem in his literary life, as obstacles were removed from his path by others whom he had already charmed and who protected him from incursions by the turmoil of the outside world that swirled around him and had wrought despair and misery to almost every other contemporary poet. In reading the biographical books by A. L. Rowse of a turn of the 17th century name and thus historical books, the reader would never be aware that such a world as the true London of 1593 ever existed.

But if the first heire of my inuention proue deformed, I shall be sorie it had so noble a godfather: and neuer after eare so barren a land, for feare it yeeld me still so bad a harvest, I leaue it to your Honourable suruey, and your Honor to your hearts content which I wish may alaies answere your owne wish, and the worlds hopeful expectation. Your Honor’s in all dutie, W.S.

On the inner page the ‘Dedication’ of ‘Venus and Adonis’ reads: “The Right Honourable Henrie Wriothesley, Earle of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield: Right Honourable, I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my vnpolisht lines to your Lordship, nor how the worlde will censure mee for choosing so strong a proppe to support so weake a burthen, onelye if you Honour seeme but pleased, I account myselfe highly praised and vowe to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some grauer labour.

William had neither an introduction to a nobleman nor had he a published work that would be known in London before 1593. No reference, then, that has been forwarded that would indicate that William was known to have written anything or to have had employment or to have lived in London before 1593.The first time that the people of London had the opportunity to see and to know the name was when it appeared not upon the front title page but at the bottom of the page of the Dedication inside the published book of verse entitled ‘Venus and Adonis’ On the title page at the top was the title, ‘Venus and Adonis’, under which was a motto, an excerpt in Latin from Ovid, then the printer’s seal, then the word ‘London’, and then the words, “Imprinted by Richard Field, and are to be sold at the signe of the white Greyhound in Paules Church yard 1593”. It was a Quarto of 27 leaves. Although the ‘name’ was never seen in print before 1593, several of the Plays in the First Folio of 1623 are now claimed to be written years before 1593.

Christopher‘Dedication’.Marlowe

There are no jagged barbs in the narrative, nothing that would bring the reader to a sudden halt to question one flowing phrase, nothing related in the telling of any portion of the Legend of William that would raise the slightest doubt. Author Rowse guides every moment over the many gaps and sharp edges that awareness of his many phrases of eluding reality with his use of phrases of remote possibility as ‘there is no doubt’, along with generous numbers of ‘no doubt’ where a moment’s hesitation would reveal the realization 0that his conjectures could apply to anyone but being swept away with his steadfast conviction convinces that there ‘can be no doubt.

The biographer is saying that there could be no scintilla of a doubt that an uneducated man in a village north of London who had never written as little as a letter to a friend could ‘start out to London’ at the age of 29 to become the greatest poet-dramatist in the history of England while no one, relative, friend or famed person ever so credited the man with such a facility in his lifetime.Biographers

of William tell that the method used for a writer to procure a patron without being introduced to one personally by the recommendation of a recognized person in London society was to publish a literary work, a poem, and to dedicate it to the prospective patron. If the prospective patron agreed to give the writer his patronage, all was well. If that person did not agree to sponsor the writer, the poet could try again or, more likely, try to induce someone else to be his patron. The name ‘Shakespeare’ never appeared again on a ‘Dedication’ or to any other prospective patron. It can be concluded that he, whoever ‘he’ may be, never needed a patron before this

already had introduction to valuable people before he came to London as he had previous contact while at Cambridge with Sir Francis Walsingham, and upon arriving in London he would soon be introduced to Sir Thomas Walsingham, Sir Francis’ younger cousin. Edmund Spenser did not publish and dedicate a poem to anyone when he sought patronage as he already knew several influential people including the Earl of Pembroke.

There is no other prose, formal or informal, or a letter that is known to have been written by ‘the Stratford William who is long claimed to be ‘William Shakespeare’.

Rowse says that the words, ‘in duty’, are included in the subscription because “the poet is under obligation to the young peer as his patron”. This is an implication or outright statement that William is already in the patronage of Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton. There is no evidence that Southampton gave patronage to anyone, though other poets applied.

“The poem was licensed for publication by the Archbishop of Canterbury with his own hand, the stern Whitgift, We can only suppose by Southampton’s influence.”

Supposition is all he can do since there is no other way of having any thought that 19 year old Henry would ‘influence’ the Archbishop to give permission to print publicly an erotic poem that, if Henry were already William’s patron, there would be no reason either to print it or to write it. The impression always given in reference to either ‘Venus’ or ‘Lucrece’ is that they were written because Henry was William’s patron, and not as essays in order to obtain his patronage. It is always taken for granted without showing evidence that Henry was his patron.

The ‘Lucrece’ Dedication reads: “The loue I dedicate to your Lordship is without end: whereof this Pamphlet without beginning is but a superfluous Moity. The warrant I have of your Honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored Lines makes it assured of acceptance. What I haue done is yours, what I haue to doe is yours, being part in all I have, deuoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duety would shew greater, meane time, as it is, it is bound to your Lordship; To whom I wish long life still lengthened with all Happinesse. Our Lordship’s in all duety. W. S.”

George Peele also dedicated a poem to Wriothesley with his ‘The Honour of the Garter’. “Gentle Wriothesley, Southampton’s star, I wish all fortune that in Cynthia’s eye. Cynthia, the glory of the western world, With all the stars in her fair firmament Bright may he rise and shine immortally”. He was not successful with Southampton, nor was Thomas Nashe with his “The Unfortunate Traveller’. In his description of the history of this printing of ‘Venus and Adonis’ A. L. Rowse says: “He dedicated the poem to Southampton in his grand gentlemanly manner.” “How beautifully phrased it is, with its instinctive tact and courtesy, the stylish balanced phrases and yet so perfectly natural, with its recurrence to a country image. There is, too, the proper reference, and subscription ‘in duty’, for the poet is under obligation to the young peer as his patron.”The words of the Dedication only follow the tradition of such dedications of the time when compared with seldom printed dedications of London’s poets of the last decade of the 16th century.In content, all dedications praise the nobleman and most are equally humble when referring to the work presented and that was customary. In the manner of phrasing, it is to be left to the discernment of the individual to compare it with the manner of other dedications. Rowse praises it. Others may be disappointed to find it ordinary. The phrase, ‘the first heir of my invention’, can be taken to mean that this is claiming to be the author’s first literary composition. The Dedication offers a second chance, before knowing the results of this audition, with another but ‘graver labour’. With no other ‘conversational writing’ in existence that is known to have been composed by William at this time, there is no similar phrasing with which to compare this to know for certain that William ever wrote this Dedication or the one for ‘The Rape of Lucrece’.

The other three editions, Rowse says ‘four’, were: “Printed by P. S. for Iohn Harrison. 1598”, an octavo of 36 leaves; “Printed by I. H. for Iohn Harrison. 1600”, an Octavo of 36 leaves; and “Printed by N. O. for Iohn Harrison. 1607”, an Octavo of 32 leaves. No further printings appeared during the lifetime of whoever did write these poems.

Another reader was enchanted with reading ‘Venus and Adonis’ immediately after the publication. He wrote a letter, dated September 21st, 1593, to the Privy Council believing that the Council caused certain books to be published to inform the Council personally that her gracious Majestie the Queene was desperately in love with him. He was William Renoldes, a soldier in her service.

‘The Rape of Lucrece’ was entered into the Stationers’ Register on May 9, 1594, and was ‘Printed by Richard Field, for Iohn Harrison, and are to be sold at the signe of the white Greyhound in Paules Church yard, 1594.” It was a Quarto of 47 leaves.

Biographer Ivor Brown says that the fewer editions printed for ‘Lucrece’ may be explained: “But of course, a far larger first print may have been made based on the previous success” of Venus. The ‘success’ of Venus was not all that ‘previous’. It was only one year between the first print of each poem and by the same reasoning, larger prints of Venus would have been made in the 1594 and the 1596 editions long before the second and third printings of Lucrece. The explanation of why there were fewer editions of Lucrece could be more logically explained as the initial attraction of Venus was not its style or its subject, as Lucrece was almost identical in both, but that its erotic treatment was novel for the time. Its attraction has been compared to the storm which Swinburne’s ‘Poems and Ballads’ created when it ‘burst upon London’ in 1866. Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837 1909) gained immediate fame in 1865 with his verse drama ‘Atlanta in Calcydon’ in the spirit of Greek drama but the following year, he created the famous literary scandal with his “Poems and Ballads’ that celebrated sexual love, again in the spirit of the Greek lyric poets, but he was accused of merely attempting to shock and to defy the austere standards of his Victorian times.

‘Venus and Adonis’ is entered upon the Stationer’s Register on April 18, 1593 and is printed later in the year by Richard Field. Further editions appeared in 1594, 1596, 1599, 1600 and two editions in 1602 and no further editions appeared in William’s lifetime. The title page of the 1594 edition is worded exactly as in the 1593, also a Quarto of 27 leaves. The 1596 edition title page was changed to read: “Imprinted at London by R. F. for Iohn Harrison. 1600”, an Octavo of 27 leaves (Stratford Shakespeare 1950). This totals seven editions ‘in his own lifetime’, not ‘ten or eleven’ as Rowse claims. There is no reason to say that William ‘saw the poem through the press’ which is the task of the publisher and it not known who took the poem to Richard Field. The title pages of the first and second editions do not identify a publisher as the editions of 1596 and 1600 did when it was John Harrison (Iohn Harrison). If ‘William’ had taken it to Richard Field, Field would have known that this person was not the William Shaxper that he had known for years at the Stratford Free School.

Having a patron was a means that a poet, playwright or artist had in order to create as he wished without having to be concerned with debt. It was not a commitment to write or create work specifically to please the patron as was the later ‘poet laureate’ position where the poet would be obliged to write for special occasions or be required to commemorate events in verse at the discretion of the Monarch. “Nothing was wanting to make the poem a success, and it succeeded beyond the poet’s dreams ten or eleven editions in his own lifetime, twenty before the Civil War winged culture, Shakespeare himself saw the poem through the press”, says A.L. Rowse.

He wrote: “Also within these few days ther is a nother booke made of Venus and Adonis wherin a queene represents the person of Venus, which queene is in great love (forsothe) with Adonis, and greatly desires to kise him, and she woes him most intierly, telling him although she be oulde, yet she is lustie freshe & moyst, full of love & life (I beleve a goodell more than a busshell full) and she can trip it as lightly as a phery nimfe vppon the sandes and her foote steps not seene, and much ado with red & white.”

about William is measured by a unique standard. William alone is praised for his ‘association’ with Henry Wriothesley which is evidenced by this Dedication only, but several poets had made dedications to the Earl of Southampton at about the same time as he was ‘on indisputable record, as the poet’s patron’, but the Earl accepted no one to whom to give money. Henry, at nineteen, had wealth and therefore power.

Later essayists were not so enchanted by either Poem. William Hazlitt (1745 1820) a Cambridge and Middle Temple man likened both poems to a “couple of ice houses, as hard, as glittering, and as cold”. He said that William was “all the time thinking of his verses and not of his subject, not of what his characters would feel, but of what he shall say. The whole is laboured uphill work. Sentiment is built upon plays of words; the hero or heroine feels not from the impulse of passion, but from the force of dialectics. There is besides a strange attempt to substitute the language of painting for that of poetry”. Hazlitt did not feel from his William’s pen that violent outburst of passion and show of wild remorse as he was wont to have. William bore too stubborn and too strange a hand over the emotions that he should have loved The greatest criticism of ‘Venus’ came from the man who did not comment whatever upon these poems. Christopher Marlowe by writing his epic poem, ‘Hero and Leander’, left “one of the most wholehearted tributes to the force and beauty of desire yet produced by any English poet”. So says the modern poet and historian, Peter Quennell, in his ‘Shakespeare’. He says of one excerpt from ’Hero’, “There is nothing as direct, moving or realistic as this in the whole extent of ‘Venus and Adonis”. ‘Hero and Leander’, far superior in the opinion of most critics, was left unfinished in 1593, but was concluded by George Chapman with four new sestiads, but compared to his friend’s verse, it was ponderous material not catching Marlowe’s style or mood, but published by Chapman in 1598. William has not imbued these poems with the fire of amorous attraction, violence and guilt involved with these human lovers, and William cannot capture the internal emotions of humans, yet William is credited retroactively with writing several plays including ‘Richard the Third’ and ‘Henry VI, part 2 and 3’, all before 1593 ! Algernon Swinburne is to have written a book about William, claimed in 1890, another in 1909, by some modern authors, but Swinburne found Venus “at times laboured and at others a little stuffy, but in its defects as in its merits, in its pictorial quality, it reminds us more of a young Keats than of any other poet. It comes out more in those references to country life and animals in which the poem abounds !” Yet, this ‘William’ is now adulated as being the author of these several plays written years before this “the first heire of my inuention”.

Biographers constantly associate William to the ‘pastoral scene’, those ‘glimpses of Stratford’ as if he alone had experienced country life. Almost every poet was from out of London. Most had experienced Cambridge that is more idyllic than Stratford. It is forgotten that although the walled City of London was crammed with its buildings and its people, everything west of Whitehall, just south of where Trafalgar Square is today, was open country as was the area surrounding the Curtain theatre Yet, the writers draw attention even to the Dedication phrases, ‘so barren a land’ and ‘yield me still so bad a harvest’ as ‘its recurrence to a country image’.Everything

George Peele had this tribute to Henry in his appeal to him in ‘The Honour of the Garter’: “Gentle Wriothesley, Southampton’s star, bright may he rise and shine immortally”. Thomas Nashe also made a dedication to Henr y in his book ‘The Unfortunate Traveller’ or ‘The Life of Jack Hilton’ with: “Long have I desired to approve my wit unto you, a dear lover and cherisher you are, as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves. Your Lordship is the large spreading branch of renown from whence these my idle leaves seek to derive their whole these dedications seems humble or servile in their applications but William’s “Dedication is in humble terms, but not servile as dedications went in those days”. No one credits Nashe with redolence of the ‘countrie image’ with his ‘spreading branch’. When Nashe’s offer is “snubbed”, the “wit is not approved by the judge” but “no such intimation of disfavour came to ‘Shakespeare”. The biographer imagines that Henry “snubs” or does not “approve”. These writers say that Southampton had every good reason to be “proud of his discovery” as Venus “was a hit”. No one knows if Henry was ever informed of these dedications, or if he as much as ever read a book and certainly not all of these books containing these several odd dedications by every Tom, George and Will. When the ‘Dedication’ to Southampton vanished from the second edition of Nashe’s book, his having been ignored, writers imply that it was Nashe who cancelled the dedication, not a printer or publisher. When the Dedication in further editions of Venus remain, it is not recognized or even assumed that William had nothing to do with the publications although publishers and printers changed but they also do not admit that Southampton did not agree to be a patron for William as the plea remained over the years in printing after printing.

Ivor Brown says: “When Shakespeare spoke of the first heir of is invention he meant not his first piece of writing, since he had been play-writing for some years, but his first published book.” The Dedication that William wrote, as they claim, states ‘but if the first heir of my invention prove deformed’. This is supposed to be the ‘man’ himself in the single statement that he is supposed ever to have made about himself, and the biographer claims he does not mean what he says. The dedication says ‘heir of my invention; not ‘first piece of writing’ and if William meant ‘my first published book’, he would be expected to say ‘book’ as everywhere else the biographers claim he was an exacting master with no mincing about when stating what was to be stated.Thebiographers are convinced that Henry Wriothesley gave patronage to an unknown writer of a first work that is not original in content, and not very outstanding in style by future accounts, while Henry is known to ignore poets of proven ability and famed in their reputation, some with associations with nobility, and then, within a year this Earl is ‘an exalted friend’ while the pleading ‘dedications’ remain in the further printings and Henry becomes a part of legend himself, the subject of stories and tales fabricated in later days by William Davenant, for one, in his story of the ‘thousand pounds’ given by Henry to William.

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William is said to be ‘astute’ for steering clear of Ralegh and his ‘university wits’ and for choosing, rather, the ‘opposite camp’ headed by Essex and including Southampton who was Essex’ right arm or more likely his left arm. It would not matter, Ralegh, Essex and Southampton would all soon be sent to the Tower with only Henry escaping the executioner’s axe with a later pardon from King James.

‘Time honoured John of Gaunt’ was Henry Wriothesley’s ancestor and his grandfather was a Viscount Montague. Henry was eight when his father died and so Henry came under the ward ship of the Lord Treasurer, Lord Burlegh who sent him to St John’s College at twelve and he received his M. A. at sixteen. He was admitted to Grays Inn the following year when Burlegh planned to have him marry the 15 year old daughter of the Earl of Oxford, the Lady Elizabeth Vere. Henry refused. His ambition was to hunt the hawk and ride with the hounds, to soldier in foreign fields and to follow the hoof prints of the fabulous and fashionable Earl of Essex. At 25, Henry was already in Fleet Street prison under the wrath of the Queen as he had wooed and compromised Elizabeth Vernon, a Maid of Honour to the Queen, and a relative of Essex. Henry was released and he accompanied the Earl of Essex in battle during an uprising in Ireland.

What possible association could there been, what attraction for camaraderie when Henry was a wastrel, an amateur and unwise gambler and taken with women at court ? The imagined association would have been a mystery as William was not Essex and Henry was a witness, not a reader, of Someplays.‘scholars’ are determined to support their contention that Henry Wriosthesley was a great friend and confidant of this William as they “see him in Sonnets” as the flaring youth in Sonnet 136 and then moving on to tell of the agony endured with a cruel mistress of Darkness, Sonnets that have stirred centuries of controversy and a pointless chase in the 19th century after who was William’s ‘Mr W. H’ when it was obvious that it was T. T.’s Mr W.H. as ‘T.T.’ was Thomas Thorpe, the publisher who was addressing ‘Mr W. H.’ and William had no part in the printing as he never had with any printing. What meaning did the Sonnets have to the readers of the early 1600’s ? They were “never intended to be published”, they were passed around “among private friends” and this is re quoted in biographies without a hint about who those ‘friends’ may have been since not one person has claimed to have known ‘W. S.’ personally. Were they the neighbours on Hoglane ‘within 6 dores’ of Norton Folgate ? ‘No doubt’ they included Wilson the Pyper, Mr Tuppin and Mother Golden the Baude, those other fictitious Dickensian ‘friends’ in Southerk who were fancifully forged for him in 1835.

The Sonnets published in 1609, were given only that one printing and never again until 1640, and, seemingly, were commented upon little if at all by anyone of the day. However, there appeared at this time of 1594, a curious publication that bears an interesting parallel to the information remaining on William of Stratford’s’ visits to the Inn of the Davenant’s at Oxon. Was his private non Stratfordian life at that time less of a mystery than the Sonnets became later and did someone know that the mistress of the metered Sonnets had a living inspiration ?

Would these unsigned sonnets, ten dozen intimate stanzas addressed to a sixteen year old boy by this older man, be passed along un chaperoned, straying before the prying eyes while laughing friends deride or are the darker verses boasting a passion for the heartless wanton woman read aloud by the author himself in private crimson rooms over cakes and ale, ah, but who alone finally possesses these Sonnets unscrambled but in perfect sequential order and, unopposed, and presses them into print without further comment or objection, not so much as a “much offended with M. Thorpe that presumed to make so bold with his name”.

This does not outline the pattern of a man that would appeal to William of Stratford, not gentle Willy of the pastoral scene. This was an emerging hot blood already at odds with the man most powerful in the realm, Lord Burlegh. He was a man who also was ready to follow the most tempestuous man in England, Essex. Both were handsome, ambitions, proud and unpredictable.

Hero “For as a hot proud horse highly distains To have his head controll’d, but breaks the reins, Spits forth the ringled bit, and with his hoves Checks the submissive ground.”

Venus “Rose cheek’d Adonis hied him to the chase” (Line 3) Hero “Rose cheek’d Adonis’ (Line 93) Venus “And forth she rushes, snorts, and neighs aloud: The strong neck’d steed, being tied unto a tree, Breaketh the rein, and to her straight he goes.” (Lines 263 4)

There are references to ‘Hero and Leander’ in ‘Loues Labore Lost’ that must have been written before 1594. Peter Quennell says, “William seems to have read the manuscript and fallen immediately beneath its spell, he was always appreciative of other men’s gifts” and, referring to Venus, “presumably he was following Marlowe’s lead”. How was this possible as ‘Hero’ was unfinished when Marlowe ‘disappeared’ in May of 1593 and ‘Venus’ was registered at the Stationer’s office the month before, so how was William ‘following Marlowe’s lead’ and what was William supposed to have written under Marlowe’s ‘spell’ ?

With the number of Puritan critics of theatre in 1593, it is surprising that the poem received permission to be printed and it is not certain whether Archbishop Whitgift actually read this erotic work before licensing it. The greatest number of Venus editions in the shortest time was four from 1599 to 1602 that coincides with the writing and production of the satirical ‘Parnassus’ trilogy of plays that may have created curiosity among those who had not yet read Venus. That was the last edition and the last ‘comment’ upon Venus for the rest of William’s life, after the style of the writing had been publicly derided on stage in the three plays of ‘Parnassus’.

Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander’ has been called “one of the most whole hearted tributes to the force and beauty of desire yet produced by an English poet” and as the “most successful of English Ovidian poems”. Yet, in 1600, both ‘Hero’ and Venus’ were thought to have equal erotic effect and are described in a play as ‘two luscious marrow-bone pies for a young married wife’, marrow bones being an aphrodisiac. As a literary work ‘Hero and Leander’ had been considered the superior creation, but it was not known to the public until completed by Chapman and printed in 1598, which is another possible reason why editions of Venus ceased in 1602 until 1616. The public that was attracted to Venus had found the equally erotic but superior verse of ‘Hero and Leander’. ‘Hero’ was licensed at the Registry on September 28, 1593 for publication.

Hero “In night is Cupid’s day.”

Venus “In night, quoth she, desire seems best of all.” (Line 720)

Venus “Therefore, despite of fruitless chastity.” (Line 751)

Venus “But gold that’s put to use more gold begets.” (Line 768)

Hero “A fruitless cold virginity.”

Hero “Then treasure is abused When misers keep it: being put on loan In time it will return us two for Biographersone.”stress how popular ‘Venus’ and ‘Lucrece’ were with the public indicated by the six reprinting of ‘Venus’ and three of ‘Lucrece’, but they also stress how they appealed to those who praised the poems in print by citing all of the instances that could be found.

The ‘references’ to ‘Hero and Leander’ in ‘Venus and Adonis’ are:

Although Venus is said to have been much more popular than Lucrece having seven editions to four for Lucrece, all printed references to Venus mentioned both poems, and all references were published during a twelve to eighteen-month period from 1598 to 1599, and no reference to either poem appeared after 1599 for the rest of William’s lifetime.

John Weever, 1599 “Honey tongued Shakespeare, when I saw thine issue, I swore Apollo got them and none other, Their rosy tainted features clothed in tissue, Some heaven born goddess said to be their mother: Rose cheeked Adonis with his amber tresses, Fair fire hot Venus charming them to love her. Chaste Lucretia, virgin-like, her dresses, Proud lust stung Tarquin seeking still to prove her.”

William Covell, 1595, a fellow of a Cambridge college is claimed to have made an annotation a note printed in the margin of his ‘Polimanteia’: “All praiseworthy: Lucretia sweet Shakespeare...wanton Adonis. Watson’s heir”. Rowse says that Watson was “scholarly and gentlemanly… as much admired for his Latin as for his English verse”. This ‘Watson’ is not identified. Tom Watson was Marlowe’s close friend. Another biographer, Sidney Lee, says that “In 1595 William Clerke wrote in Polimanteia: ‘All praise worthy Lucretia sweet Shakespeare’” No biographer mentions the notes of both Covell and Clerke and so none explains or excuses the strange similarity in the words these men inserted in their Polimateias

After the first printings of the two poems, only some references to them use the name ‘Shakespeare’ but never ‘William Shakespeare’. Some of those references are: ‘W. Har.’, the author of an ‘Elegy on Lady Helen Brank’, wrote, “You that have writ of Chaste Lucretia” included among “our greater poets”. Although the number of people around London in 1594 who had a name that could be shortened to ‘W. Har.’ could be several, historians have suggested William Harvey, Wriothesley’s future step father, and the poet William Herbert as their claimants of 1594.

Gabriel Harvey wrote on a copy of an edition of Chaucer published in 1598: “The younger sort takes much delight in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis; but his Lucrece and his tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, have it in them to please the wiser sort”. Hamlet was first printed in 1603. Harvey is claimed to have classed William with Spenser, Chapman and Daniel among the most ‘flourishing metricians’ of the time. This written comment, then, must have been penned after the publication of Hamlet although it is written into a 1598 edition of Chaucer.

The biographers seemingly finding their information from the same or similar sources differ on this one short Barnfield verse. Rowse and Quennell both say that (*) is ‘obtain’ and they quote (**) as ‘whose Lucrece’ and translate (***) as ‘have placed’ and they place a comma after ‘Shakespeare’ and they do not capitalize Fame and Book. The Stratford Shakespeare, Vol. 17, P9, says: “Barnfield wrote these lines in ‘A Remembrance of Some English Poets’ in his ‘Poems of Divers Humours’ (1598).”

Michael Drayton, 1594, wrote in his ‘Matilda’: “Lucrece revived to live another age” Richard Barnfield, 1598, published his ‘Encomion of Lady Pecunia’ in which he gives these lines: “and Shakespeare thou, whose honey flowing vein Pleasing the world, thy praises doth contain (*), whose Venus and Lucrece (**) sweet and chaste, Thy name in fame’s Immortal Book hath plac’d (***) Live ever you, at least in Fame live ever…”

From “Parnassus, Part II”, (1599?) (iii. Lines, 1006 1055): Gull: “Pardon, fair lady, thoughe sicke thoughted Gullio maks amine unto thee, and like a bould faced sutore ‘gins to woo thee.

These references, with the sole exception of that of Harvey, never allude to William as a writer of any play. An unknown author or authors wrote a trilogy of plays to be presented to the faculty and the student body at the University of Cambridge. The three plays, ‘Pilgrimage to Parnassus’, and ‘Return from Parnassus, Parts I and II’ are considered to have been written and presented about 1600, or possibly each year between 1598 and 1601 Biographers usually quote only those lines that mention William’s name to support their claim that his two poems were very popular with the students. Rowse says: ‘Venus and Adonis’ was conceived to make its appeal to the cultivated, to the Court, and fashionable society, and here it found a delighted audience, especially with the young men of the Inns of Court and the universities, who were ready to take it to bed under their pillows and must have found it stimulating.” This is in reference to ‘Parnassus’. He says, P160, “The young men at Cambridge expressed their devotion to his poetry, rather than his plays, in their own Parnassus trilogy: ‘O sweet Master Shakespeare ! I’ll have his picture in my study at the Court. Let me hear Master Shakespeare’s vein.’ There follow verses in imitation of Venus and Adonis, of course; and then ‘let this duncified world esteem of Spencer and Chaucer. I’ll worship sweet Master Shakespeare, and to honour him will lay his Venus and Adonis under my pillow’.”

In “Return from Parnassus, Part I”, two youths, ‘Gullio’ and ‘Ingenioso’, have dialogue. No one in the biographies points out that these two characters on stage have clever ‘University Wit invented’ names in Latin: the first for a person easily duped Gullio; a gull, and the second for a clever person, ‘Ingenioso’. As every student of Free School, and thus of Cambridge, knew the word ‘ingenious’ comes from the Latin, ‘in gignere’, to beget or to invent, and this was the stage character, Ingenioso. This is the same ingenious devising of names in Latin that is found in ‘Willobie: his Avisa’, 1594, that is supposedly ‘the first literary reference of William by name’.

Reading only these excerpts presented as the biographer presents, it may be quite convincing that the students of 1600 were truly enthralled with the poetry as presented in these two poems, but Rowse gives no mention of how these lines are used or who is giving them. Ivor Brown, too, referring to the same plays says: “William was soon a favourite of the student class. In the Cambridge College, 1598 1602, there are several references to the sweet charms of Shakespearian poetry”.

Ingen: (Aside to audience) “We shall have nothinge but puir Shakspeare and shreds of poetrie that he hath gathered at the theators !” [‘he’ is ‘Shakspeare’]

In their quoted excerpts, the biographers imply, or they are quite convinced, that the young men at Cambridge and at the Inns of Court were genuinely devoted to this poetry and were expressing it here literally, and the inference, too, is that there is no mention of plays in the Parnassus passages. The actual scripts of the plays, however, reveal the true impression that these poems had upon the Cambridge students and the literary scene in London.

Gull: “Pardon mee, moy mittressa, ast am a gentleman, the moone in comparison of thy bright hue a meere slutt, Anthonio’s Cleopatra a blacke browde milkmaide, Hellen a dowdie.”

Ingen: (Aside to listeners) Marke, Romeo and Juliet ! O monstrous theft ! I thinke he will runn throughe a whole booke of Samual Daniell’s !

Ingen: “Sweete Mr Shakspeare ! . . . . . My pen is youre bounded vassal to commande. But what vayne woulde it please you to have them in ?”

Gullio is the dupe who woos his lady in the ‘honie tongued’ manner of the new style set by the latest poem ‘Venus and Adonis’ and since the name of the author is in the book, Ingenioso uses this name as an expletive “O sweet Mr Shakspeare !” that is stated as ‘O sweet Master Shakspeare !’ There is no ‘e’ after ‘Shak’ throughout and so this would be pronounced as ‘Shaks peare’ and since final ‘e’s did not change a soft vowel to a hard vowel, the final ‘e’ on ‘peare’ may have been pronounced as ‘pear’, the fruit, and thus ‘Shax pare’. The name should be divided, not as it is now, ‘Shake speare’, but as ‘Shaks peare’ for the proper pronunciation.

Now from “Parnassus Part II” (iv. i. 1211 1227)

Ingen: “O sweet Mr Shakspeare ! I’le have his picture in my study at the courte !”

Gull: Not in a vaine veine (pettie, i’ faith !) make me them in two or three divers vayns, in Chaucer’s, Gower’s and Spencer’s and Mr Shakspeare’s. Marry, I thinke I shall entertaine those verses which run like these: Even as the sunn with purple cloured face Had tane his laste leave on the weeping morne, &c.”

Ingen: “Faire Venus, Queene of beutie and of love, Thy red doth stayne the blushinge of the morne, Thy snowie necke shameth the milkwhite dove, Thy presence doth this naked worlde adorne; Gazing on thee all other nymphes I scorne. When ere thou dyest slowe shine that Satterday, Beutie and grace muste sleepe with thee for aye !”

Gull: “Noe more ! I am one that can judge accordinge to the proverbe, bovem ex unguibus. Ey, marry, Sir, these have some life in them ! Let this duncified worlde esteeme of Spenser and Chaucer, I’le worship sweet Mr Shakspeare, and to honoure him will lay his Venus and Adonis under my pillowe as wee reade of one (I doe not well remember his name, but I am sure he was a kinge) slept with Homer under his bed’s heade.”

It can be imagined from this portrayal, the young hot bloods at St John’s, Cambridge getting many laughs when they preformed these lines to the undergraduates. Knowing the ‘esteeme’ held by their masters for Spencer and Chaucer, they could get quite a giggle from the boys by praising the over sweet voluptuous Venus. While Gullio is wooing the ‘fair lady’, Ingenioso interrupts his love poems with comments, instructions and asides including his admonition to Gullio that he better woo only with pure Shakspear, and the inference that William picks ups ‘shreds of poetrie’ from the plays that he sees at the theatres is a quotation that never finds interpretation in the biographies. There was no idea prevalent during the lifetime of William of Stratford that the name on the Dedication of Venus and Adonis was the name of an actor in the theatre. That inference came long after 1816.

When Gullio compares the ‘fair lady’ to the moon, Cleopatra and Helen of Troy, Ingenioso tosses in the aside: “Mark you, he’s doing Romeo and Juliet, now, I’m afraid we are in for a whole book of Samuel Daniel.” Is this another reference unknown now but privy to the students?

Gull: “Let mee heare Mr Shakspear’s veyne.”

Gull: Thrise fairer than myself thus I began The gods faire riches, sweete above compare, Staine to all nimphes, (m)ore lovely then a man. More white and red than doves and roses are ! Nature that made thee with herselfe had (at) strife, Saith that the worlde hath ending with thy life.” [This is the 2nd verse of ‘Venus’ but Gulio omits those letters in parenthesis]

Gullio puns ‘Not in a vain vein’, but what about two or three veins suggesting something in the vien of the first two lines of ‘Venus and Adonis’ which he quotes and then says ‘et cetera’ and so on and on, whereon Ingenioso utters his expletive, ‘O sweete Master Shakspeare ! Ile have his picture in my study at the courte’ This, too, is another hoot for the students as there is no picture of William to be placed anywhere. They do not know or does anyone else know one whit about this sugar shake or have they been able to discern anything about him.

Biographers do not present this in a way to show that the whole trilogy of plays was a sophomoric farce. The author of their plays also makes a university-wit reference to the one in classic literature who slept with Homer’s book under his bed’s head, a private joke among the students getting another guffaw when the character Gullio cannot remember who it was but he is sure that it was a king, he would receive at least one point for knowing that. Biographers often omit this portion of the quotation and that omission makes the quotation appear as if the students admire the Venus poem so well as to put it under their pillows. Gullio is relating to the old story of what’s his name who put Homer under his bed’s head. When Ingenioso answers Gullio’ call for verse in Master Shakspeare’s vein, with more red and white, snowy neck and red stain, blushing morn and milkwhite dove, the satire on fair Venus becomes obvious that the poem is a compendium of heavy eroticism that is anything but the style of Spencer or Sidney, so Ingenioso obliges with naked nymphes that ‘must sleep with thee’ all on a ‘Satterday’.

‘Romeo and Juliet’ was performed from 1595, but the printed Quarto and never listed the author of that play. When Gullio launches into verse filled with ‘whites and reds’ and ‘doves and roses’, Ingenioso cries out, ‘At last we have sweet Master Shakspeare !’ and offers to write for Gullio whatever verses he would like but in which vein.

“We allude to ‘The Return from Parnassus’ which was indisputably acted before the death of Queen Elizabeth. In a scene where two young students are discussing the merits of particular poets, one on them speaks thus of Shakespeare, “Who loves Adonis love or Lucrece rape, His sweeter verse contains heart robbing life.”

Oddly, these lines, however satirical, are clever and even beautiful. If John Gielgud had read these lines upon the stage, his audience would have been entranced by their beauty, but then imagine the same words when uttered by the student actor as he pranced about while delivering them with a cracked sibilant voice ! O sweet Shaks scene !

Rowse says that the Cambridge men expressed devotion to his poetry rather than to his plays. This is precisely because they knew of no plays credited to the name on the poems. As the date of the Parnassus plays is uncertain, the true date could be a year earlier or later, 1598 or 1599, when no play was yet published with William’s name on it. ‘Loues labore lost’ was printed in 1598 but the title page said only ‘corrected and augments by W. Shakespere’.

The third play, ‘The Return from Parnassus, Part III’ has a character called ‘Judicio’. Now here is a prudent fellow who should be able to show good judgement. He says: Judicio: “Who loues not Adonis loue, or Lucrece rape ? His sweeter verse contaynes hart throbbing line, Could but a graver subject him content, without loues foolish lazy languishment?

When these lines are quoted in the biographies or only the first two lines omitting the rest, it is taken as a great tribute to William’s poetry, but it is satire on both poems, with its ‘sweeter verse’ and ‘hart throbbing’, asking, “Could he not have contented himself with ‘a graver subject’ without this ‘foolish lazy languishment’ ?” ‘The ‘graver’ subject’ is the ‘some graver labour’ mentioned on the ‘Venus’ Dedication page that became the ‘Lucrece’ that was promised to be invented during all his ‘idle hours’ in his ‘lazy languishment’. The students knew the book and the Dedication. Another biographer, (Books, Inc 1939) misquotes these lines.

Biographers have used this ‘Jonson’ quotation from the jocular ‘Parnassus’ to infer or to ‘prove’ that Ben Jonson was not well known or well liked but this indicates only that the biographers all take this play as being a serious critique. The students, rather, were getting more laughs by referring to Jonson who had just begun an illustrious career with his play ‘Every Man in his Humour; in 1598 and his satirical plays being performed at Blackfriars as with his ‘Poetaster’ as ‘a wittiest fellow, of a bricklayer, in England’ that is a complement. There are commas around ‘of a brick layer’ meaning that Jonson was ‘of a bricklayer’ or ‘the son of a brick layer’. The phrase that Jonson was ‘but a slow inventor’ is an ironic statement also receiving knowing winks from the undergraduates as they knew that Jonson was the most prolific writer with his masques and his plays on contemporary subjects in quick succession with some in answer to those of other playwrights. Jonson had been with Henslowe’s group for the past six or seven years and so, rather that proving that he was little-known, the students must have known more about Jonson than later critics to come up with this amusing reference.

Even in naming their on stage characters Gullio and Ingenioso, the Cambridge cut ups are having their last laugh, for who are the gulls and the naïve ? They are not the Cambridge men who express ‘heart throbbing’ devotion to this ‘Shaks pear’, but the gulls and the simpletons who ‘will place his [non existent] picture in their study’ and ‘his Venus under their pillow’.

This biographer, as most of the others, separates William from all Elizabethan life. Since this one play omits any recognition of ‘William’s plays’, then all plays must have been ignored or ‘not looked upon as recognized literature’ thereby excluding all the works of all playwrights since 1580. He, too, does not ‘recognize’ that there were no plays known as being attributed to William in 1589or at any time before 1593.

This completely reverses the meaning by omitting ‘not’ in ‘Who loves not Adonis love’ and changing ‘heart throbbing’ to ‘heart robbing’. No matter, it does not occur to him either that the play is a satire on his beloved William. He notes“Not the most distant allusion is made to any of his dramatic productions, although the poet criticized by the young students immediately before Shakespeare was Ben Jonson, who was declared to be ‘the wittiest fellow, of a brick layer, in England, but a slow inventor’. Hence we might imagine that, even down to as late a period as the commencement of the seventeenth century, the reputation of Shakespeare depended rather upon his poems than upon his plays; almost as if productions for the stage were not looked upon, at that date, as part of the recognized literature of the country.”

FRAUDS & STEALTHS OF THE VICTORIAN AGE Robert J. Meyer

During the Victorian Age, a great revived interest in the Elizabethan and Jacobean times inspired artists to portray the dramatic events in the lives of Mary, Queen of the Scots and her son, James I of England. ‘The murder of David Riccio’ was pivotal in the lives of both Mary and James and was the subject of at least two Victorian artists.

‘The Death of Riccio’ (‘The murder of Rizzio’) by Sir William Allen has been termed a ‘romanticized’ portrayal that seems a euphemism for depicting what is not true as Sir William either never read a description of the murder or was not concerned with the true events. The scene has also been termed ‘inaccurate’ as the murder did not take place in Mary’s bedchamber but in a tiny anteroom. The picture does not portray the actual death of Riccio as that occurred on the stairway far from Mary’s eyes, but the moment pictured is when Ruthven has drawn back his dagger to make his first thrust into Riccio. That is the least inaccuracy. Sir William depicts a room in which eight armed men are preparing to kill Riccio as he is down to the floor on one knee. Three men are in full amour with steel helmets, one behind Ruthven with dagger held high. Off to the side, Darnley stands holding Mary by the wrist restraining her from interceding. Darnley is wearing a cap although he had been with Mary all evening in this room. When Ruthven and others burst into the anteroom, the first object to be violently overturned was a very small table. The room is no more than eight feet long and four feet wide. In the picture nothing in the large room is in disarray with a long table undisturbed with cloth, plates and urn in place, a crucifix hangs over the edge of the table. Beside an adjacent chair, a lute rests on the carpeted floor. The content of this picture is totally at odds with either Mary’s description of the events or the one related by Ruthven. Mary had placed herself between Riccio and Ruthven when Ruthven took Darnley’s dagger to thrust it into Riccio and Darnley did not restrain Mary.

The writer, Thomas Carlyle, himself a voracious scholar, was incensed by the suggestions of Delia Bacon to him in 1857 that the pronouncements of all the scholars of the Folio Plays were dead wrong in their claim that William of Stratford wrote them. Several of those scholars to whom Carlyle referred were deliberate forgers, yet he blatantly refused to doubt their word since their reputations were considered impeccable as they were gentlemen and noted scholars.

In another ‘Death of Riccio’, the artist, John Opie, dramatically arranges the characters. Ruthven with one hand holds Riccio’s arm while his bare right arm readies to thrust a curved dagger into Riccio. A fully armoured man with helmet and vizor stands behind Ruthven as in the Sir William Allan painting. Three other helmeted men have entered at a doorway behind, one bareheaded and robed, another with a robe but steel helmet and a lance that would reach through Riccio if it were lowered. The doorway space is filled with six or seven pikes and lances high in the air, all to take the unarmed lute player. Darnley holds Mary around the waist with a fully armoured left arm although he has spent the evening with her sitting in anteroom. Riccio is in his nightshirt here but is fully dressed in the Allan portrait.

In the Victorian Age, gentility and scholarship were greatly respected, and by none more so than gentlemen and scholars. Originally, gentilities were the qualities considered appropriate to those of social standing and the statements and claims made by a scholar were taken as genuine.

The Victorian Age is now well documented as to the frauds in paleontological science in which many noted scholars could not determine the true identity of fraudulent bones presented as authentic just as the foremost literary scholars could not recognize the forgeries presented by Collier, a member of the Shakespeare Society. None used their considerable artistic talents more fraudulently than the Victorian portrait painters who portrayed historical events on wide canvasses that were completely devoid of truth. Either they deliberately intended to falsify the events they presented realistically or they were totally ignorant of the historical truths, or were the accounts of these great moments in English History that they illustrated, available to them only in their deformed legendary states and those artists were innocent of the rightful accounts ?

The picture, by its contents, could be, rather, Mary’s confrontation with George Gordon, the 4th Earl of Huntly, who had challenged her authority in Aberdeen, and who met her on the field of Corrichie on October 28, 1562 when he fell dead of a stroke. Mary had already hanged and beheaded his son, Alexander, who barred Inverness Castle to her. She had the portly Huntly dismembered, and six months later put him on trial. As a manuscript described, “The coffin was set upright, as if the Earl had stood on his feet and upon it a piece of good black cloth with his [heraldic] arms fast pinned, as if himself had been alive.”

‘A romanticized 19th century engraving of the dramatic incident at Gowrie House’ is an unbelievable conundrum serving only to compound the mystery of the Gowrie Conspiracy. It is impossible to identify anyone except James VI who stands to one side un-dishevelled in a room where he was not present during any sword fighting or stabbing after having struggled with Alexander. The locked room to which there were two doors is portrayed as having three large open doors in perfect condition although one was truly battered down. A battle ensues with seven men armed with swords, three men in full chest armour and vizored helmets. The Victorian artists seemed to have a penchant for armouring their Elizabethan subjects while indoors to appear as knights from the time of King Arthur. The central figure in ruffled collar, hat and pantaloons has one foot on the stomach of a dead man on the floor, while he drives his sword through the waist of the vizored man who holds his two swords high overhead and away from his opponent ! Who is the dead man, it cannot be Alexander, the Master of Ruthven, as he was killed on the stairway out of this picture. Nor can it be his brother, John, for he was killed in this room without raising his sword and all before the King’s men broke down the door and when James was not in sight but in hiding. The engraving depicts a battle that never took place between non existent armoured men and unidentifiable men all wearing soft hats indoors on the 5th of August 1600. The picture is not only false in every detail but is ridiculous in that no fully armoured man with two swords would raise both high into the air leaving his unprotected waist to be run thought and by an un armoured swordsman. The portrait does not support anyone’s version of what happened in the room. James said that only one armoured man was present, and that he never fought anyone but was never seen by anyone entering the room from the hallway.

Of all these 19th century artist’s conception of Mary in their paintings, not one has any likeness to any portrait of Mary painted in her lifetime, though these portraits were most possibly available to the artist, but if a 19th century artist had imitated one of the portraits, he would of necessity have had to continue to imitate the style throughout his entire tableaux, and be no nearer the truth, as any16th century portrait would be in itself but one artist’s interpretation.

“The Assassination of Regent Moray” presents a totally false portrayal of the Earl of Moray’s Death. In the crowded main street of Linlithgow, wounded Moray lies in the middle of the road supported by two men. Another man holds back a milling crowd. A man is mounted on the only horse in the scene. When Moray was shot while riding out of town, he fell from his horse but immediately re mounted and rode back to the house where he had slept and he died in that house later that day. His horse that never moved from him is not in the picture. The scene is closer to ‘The Death of Nelson’ in the placing of the human figures that it is to the assassination of Moray, and it falsely elicits sympathy for the life long scourge of Mary Queen of the Scots. In another painting, sometimes called a ‘wildly romantic painting’, and claimed to depict the Battle of Carberry Hill where Mary surrendered. A fully armoured man lies dead at Mary’s feet, while she, two ladies in waiting and a priest stand looking down upon him. A dead horse lies between them. A melee of men, smoke and flags fill the field in the background to portray a battle in which no armies clashed, no shot was fired and no blood was shed. Who lies at Mary’s feet ? Where is Bothwell ? If, in a ‘romanticized painting’, much of what is depicted is not true, a ‘wildly romantic painting’ must mean that it is totally false.

The fervour over the new theory of evolution resulted in an over zealous exhibition of the skeletons of prehistoric horses that were arranged in the display according to their size, beginning with the smallest and concluding with the largest, an arrangement that gave the immediate and decided impression that the modern horse began as the smallest creature and continued to enlarge in size in the order displayed, whereas, the various skeletons were actually found in time periods that were not chronological. This was a deliberate fraud against an innocent public to support the contention that in evolution, animals ‘improved’ continually by becoming larger, an aspect never stated nor intended by Charles Darwin, the implication that ‘bigger is Twobetter’falsedinosaur exhibits were long lasting. The first had the head of one prehistoric animal displayed on the body of another, and this arrangement in a famous and reputable museum was not corrected for years after the error was brought to the attention of the authorities. The more flagrant and universal portrayal of Dinosaurs standing on their large hind legs with their long tails remaining to drag along the ground continued the entirely false impression of the manner in which these creatures moved, on through the greater part of the 20th century. Vivid book illustrations and even more convincing demonstrations in animated motion pictures created what will continue to be for decades to come the unshakeable belief that these dinosaurs were able to stand and move in ways that were for them structurally impossible.

In 1911, an amateur anthropologist found, during an excavation, fossilized portions of a human skull along with a lower jaw in a small area of populated Piltdown, a parish near Uckfield, East Sussex. These fragments were assembled and presented as the skull of a man who had lived a half million year ago. England’s foremost authorities on primitive man examined and authenticated this find as Eoanthropus. These experts were photographed as the jubilant group with their celebrated primitive, popularly proclaimed in the press as ‘Piltdown Man’.

The Victorian Era introduced the greatest number of forgeries and false claims to establish the unshakeable legend of William of Stratford even while authentic documents were being discovered to uncover the truth that give lie to the legend.

The jawbone was that of a modern chimpanzee found only in Southeast Asia and it therefore was not a fossil. The skull remained until 1951 to be tested as only 50,000 years old. Recent evidence has suggested with convincing argument that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the physician and novelist, had salted the grounds where an archaeological dig was in progress and where the bones were soon found not very deeply buried. Arthur lived in the area at the time and frequently passed by the site. He personally knew the experts who authenticated the skull, and had challenged their expertise when they scoffed at his interest in things ’unscientific’.

Such is the tendency of false impressions given greater false authenticity after 300 years.

The sudden interest in paleontological discoveries in the 1890’s created the opportunity for a number of frauds, the skull of the ‘Piltdown man’ being the most notorious. The desire for fame created another similar fraud when rivalry to see who would be first to collect the most significant set of dinosaurs bones from western America led to the fraudulent arrangement of assorted bones that were passed off as the authentic remains of a single animal.

The pity, the misfortune of these incidents lies not with the formulators but with the defrauded, most of whom were experts in their fields, the brilliant who for reasons of pride, self interest, blind loyally to a philosophic or scientific theory, or an unfounded admiration for a fellow expert, could not or would not see the fraud when they examined it. As it was later learned, many of the duped were incompetent in the basics of the craft and were ready dupes for the flamboyant frauds.

The enthusiasm for the furtherance of Darwin’s (1807 1822) proposals led to the stressing of certain features of evolution that Charles Darwin had never stated, never intended and had spoken against. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 1895), the noted biologist, became the foremost supporter in England of Darwin’s theories, or of what he supposed were specifics of the theories. Both Huxley’s numerous volumes of writing and his popular lectures on organic evolution were the factors that convinced both the public and scientists into accepting the Theory of Evolution. Darwin, himself, however, could not believe that his observations and conclusions were applicable to the human race, nor did Darwin make a specific statement regarding a simple single generational change in appearance possibly imagining that the change would be very gradual.

Doyle also was a friend of a scientist who lived in the only country where that species of chimpanzee existed. Doyle never revealed ‘his’ hoax, possibly taking private satisfaction for proving that the experts, however, brilliant, were so zealous in their enthusiasm for new and palpable evidence to support the evolution proposal that they neglected to observe the rudimentary precept of their own science, to investigate without bias. Not one of them identified the artificially aged chimpanzee bone and so never asked themselves how a deliberately aged bone from an Asian primate would be buried in an East Sussex field. Had they asked, they might have twinged to the possibility that their friend who lived in the Piltdown neighbourhood, devious Doyle, had tried to dupe them, but they did not and he did.

The usually held assumption that evolution means a series of minor changes in appearance of an organism as it evolves led some into creating fraudulent concepts, possibly unintentional, but still resultant frauds. A graphic living picture of this Neanderthal Man was created when the first drawings were published to illustrate what the face of the man would appear if living as supported by the skull fossils that were newly found in the Neander Valley. In the rush to print, a picture was published of a fleshed out skull that looked more ape like than man like and the full form was pictured with bent knees and in a crouched over ape like gait, but it seemed to confirm the notion that man evolved from the ape family. This totally false impression lasted through most of the 20th century. The one picture had blotted out 10,000 words of Darwin as Darwin had specifically stated that both man and ape had evolved from a common ancestor, not man from ape.

The ‘Neanderthal’ remains were first discovered in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1856. This was one of two archaic humans known before the 20th century and it was reconstructed and described to the public in the Victorian Age as semi human, brutish and dull witted. It is known now that the Neanderthals were very muscular, very powerful in neck, chest and legs, and it is supposed that they were ‘absorbed’, over taken, or outnumbered by ‘modern Man’, as opposed to ‘archaic Man’, between 48,000 and 32,000 years ago. This was ‘Cro Magnon’ who was first found in 1868 in a rock shelter in Les Eyzies, France. Cro Magnon was also of rugged build but of an average height of five feet, ten inches or five inches taller than ‘Homo Neanderthalensis’, and with a larger head, larger teeth; and a larger brain than 21st centurySinceMan.suits of armour in British Museums were found to hold no one larger than a twelveyear old boy in 1950, people in Victorian Age may have puzzled how the Neanderthal and Cro Magnon fitted with their concept of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, the misconception by the illustrations provided to them that creatures evolved from smaller into larger and ‘better’ form. This ancient or ‘archaic’ Man was named after the Neander Valley where it was first found. The Valley was named Neander in honour of the church historian, John August Wilhelm Neander, who had changed his name from David Mendel whose mother was related to the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86), ‘the German Socrates’ and grandfather to the symphony composer, Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn (1809 47).

picture, whether elaborately detailed or primitively plain creates a first impression that is a lasting, often permanent impression that is unshakeable. It is not possible to establish a second ‘first impression’. People in past ages have shown an implicit belief in pictures and many times against all reason.

The Victorian Age also revived the most interest in the Folio Plays and the most curiosity about the name on the title page. The names of students, writers and lecturers in the life and times of Stratford William ranged from the man who ferreted out more genuine information than all the ‘investigators’ combined over the previous 250 years to Collier who indulged in more ‘creative’ history than all the legend spinners and inventive forgers in the same quarter millennium. Others spurned any true information as being trivial.

The crude engraving of the Gunpowder Plot with primitive lack of perspective was perceived as proof of treasonous purposes, although the underground room was illustrated as being at ground level and open to the street while obviously containing more barrels of gunpowder than existed in the country. At the time those illustrations were reality at its best. When perspective introduced a third dimension, the resultant paintings presented a heightened reality taken as even more reliable although the third dimensional appearance was an illusion

This same Neanderthal skull has subsequently been used to demonstrate that a fleshed out skull can be formed to appear decidedly man-like and that Neanderthal cannot be dated earlier than a Cro Magnon based on whether one model looks more ‘modern man like’ than the other. Several different looking models have been made still conforming to the one skull, but the first published illustration of the ape like appearance is still influencing the representation of early man today.Asingle

David Mendel changed his name to Neander to signify a ‘new man’ [neu ander newly other/different]. Ironically, ‘Archaic’ Man was given the name ‘New Different’.

With the present advance in technology and with computer-enhanced and altered photographs, it is almost not entirely impossible to determine whether a photograph is genuine or the result of a composite introducing fraudulence at perfection never before possible.

The age produced great acting titans on both sides of the Atlantic bringing the Folio plays to new heights of general popularity, yet no plays were as beloved as those great plays that were almost completely rewritten with lines substituted and happy endings added. The age coined the immortal title of ‘Bard of Avon’ the great misnomer for the playwright was in no manner a ‘Bard’ with no evidence of anything written upon the Avon. A bard was an ancient Celtic poet, composer and singer to the music of a harp and this ‘author’ was neither a singer of music nor a signer of poetry.

The use of improved colours in paints allowed the portraits to be so life like that it could be reliably accepted as a person’s authentic likeness although it may have been only the artist’s interpretation of his subject’s appearance. Upon the invention of photography, at last indisputable authenticity was available that could be implicitly trusted as being evidence of the truth although the camera could lie and the cameraman could use trickery. As technology improves the possibility to create a more realistic picture and therefore one to be taken as more reliable for veracity, so technology increases the possibility to create a fraudulent picture but a fraud which is even more difficult to unmask and therefore a fraud that will be believed even more tenaciously as authentic. The famous full frontal photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald standing outdoors with the ‘guilty rifle’ in his hand is a fraud, a composite that introduces a type of rifle that he did not possess.

How much more comforting this portrait than the realistic figure of the possible but real Stratford William in London of truth and sooth, the burly barterer with the hearty handshake and the full bodied laugh that parted his flowing moustache and the trim goatee with every gladsome greeting with always an oft quoted quip, a predictable anecdote, a dependable nudge of the elbow and a wink of his twinkling eye. An innocent inquiry to him of ‘What news upon Leadenhall ?’, his favourite bartering stall , would bring tumbling forth a so familiar flow of ‘sufflaminandus’ and with such facility that the regretful questioner would be suddenly reminded that he had a doublet fitting at his tailor’s or a side of beef on the spit.

The age favoured the fanciful, the flowery, the fantasy and the phantasmagorical. The effigy of William of Stratford had stood on the church wall for 250 years but the Victorian Age preferred the vision of a slim, black-legged trim-bearded, flowing-haired white-collared ‘gentleman’ whose inspirations floated down to him in a silvery web of dreams to the reality of the goateed, portly statue on the church wall that looked more like a ‘prosperous butcher’. The Age chose the composite portrait of the pensive, penetrating mind of the sylph like man who moved quickly about a theatre prompting his ‘fellowes’ in the proper way to move their limbs and smooth their lines, giving incisive instructions to musicians to hold their ‘hotboys’ and to the lackeys to let loose their rolling cannon balls to produce the best sounds of a summer storm.

THE VINDICATION OF RICHARD III Robert J. Meyer

Why in the writing of these four plays did the course of the story change from the true history to this entertaining, even exhilarating, yet vengeful, slanderous portrayal of Richard ?

The first great character created for an English drama is considered to be the dramatic villain Richard III whose character appears in three Elizabethan plays, the second and third parts of ‘Henry VI’ and ‘Richard the Third’. The three plays of ‘Henry VI are also considered to be the first three plays of William Shake-speare, although there has been more debate on these three plays about who the author or authors could be than debate on most of the others. It is odd that this particular character Richard III should be the central figure in these debatable plays but he does not appear in the first part of ‘Henry VI’. Christopher Marlow wrote the play, ‘Harry vj’, considered to be his last, which covers the same phase of the history as does ‘Henry VI, Part I’ that does not include the character Gloster who becomes Richard III. Did Marlowe intend to continue the history in subsequent plays ? It is also strange that these two crucial plays, the one marking the end of Marlowe's career and the other what is now considered to be the ‘beginning of the career’ of the ‘Phantom Playwright’ to whom someone gave the name of ‘William Shake speare’, should take up the same story, and cover the same incidents, and that in the continuation plays, a sketch of Gloster is introduced in ‘Part II of Henry VI’ and then in Part III that portrait of Richard is fleshed in so indelibly as a scheming, avaricious villain totally intent upon grasping the power that lay within the crown that he would slay any close relative to gain it. Yet, no hint of this villainy appears in Richard until the second scene of Act III. Until then, Richard has rightly opposed his enemies from the faction of King Henr y VI who have admitted killing Richard's brother, young Edmund, and his father, the Duke of York. Richard has still two brothers, George, the Duke of Clarence, and Edward who now appears as King Edward IV in Act III, Scene II of the play ‘Henry VI, Part III’. This is the turning point in the character of Richard.This is the scene in which King Edward IV is portrayed as wooing his future Queen, the Lady Grey. Richard and his brother, Clarence, are portrayed as listening off to the side and witnessing this conversation between the King and Lady Grey. When all others leave the stage, Richard, now the Duke of Gloster, declares his hatred for them all in one of the most intriguing soliloquies in Elizabethan drama. In it, Gloster reveals his plan to attain the crown by any devious means available to him. This entire scene is one of the most moving in English drama and from this scene through the rest of the play and through the entire play of Richard the Third, we are witnessing one of the greatest characters in dramatic fiction, for as true English history, the character of Richard as portrayed in these plays is entirely false. Richard was never responsible for the death of his brother Clarence and certainly not for the death of the two young Princes in the Tower, the sons of his brother Edward IV. Richard did not even want the throne but accepted it upon the decision of parliament that he was the only rightful heir at the time.

PLAYS BEFORE 1594 IV

The sourcebook used for recounting these events in the plays was unquestionably the Holinshed 'Chronicles'. These were compiled by the Ro yal Printer, Reginald Wolfe, who died in 1573 before they were completed. His assistant, Raphael Holinshed (or Hollingshead) published the work as the 'Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland' in 1578. A revised edition appeared in 1587 that was the year that Christopher Marlowe arrived in London and from either edition of the Chronicles he created his play 'Harry vj' which is listed as having been produced at the Rose theatre in the play log of the owner Philip Henslowe.

The printers, Wolfe and Holinshed, collected these 'Chronicles' or stories from whatever material was available to them at the time. They were not historians but printers and publishers.

The story of Richard printed in the ‘Chronicles' was a 'Life' or biography that was found in the handwriting of Thomas More, the parliamentary statesman who was Speaker in the House of Commons and a personal friend of Henry VIII.

Such a portrayal would have been recognized as pure nonsense from the first moment it was ever played on stage, however much it was enjoyed as a rousing good tale. King Edward was twenty two at the time of the events in this scene and even ‘William Shaxper’ of Stratford would have been too old for the part. Gloster's great soliloquy of promised vengeance would have been more appropriately pronounced if Lady Grey had remained on stage to deliver the speech with a caressing fury. Elizabeth Woodville would become the greatest role for an actress in Elizabethan drama, but only if Elizabeth the Queen had allowed it to be performed. (1591 2 ?)

Thomas More, too young to have known the life of Richard III personally, did receive his early education while in the household of John Morton who was very close to the events of Richard's time. Thomas More may have written the story in his 'own hand' but at the dictation of John Morton, or he could have re written or copied out the story as set down by Morton.

She had already ordered certain sections to be expurgated from the 1587 revised edition of the Holinshed Chronicles that contained this fictitious history. Would, then, this history fable be recognized as being chronologically incorrect ? University courses were still founded on Greek and Latin works and the only sources for English history, if it were taught, were the various Chronicles or this 'Life' or that from which they were reprinted which may not have been explicit about the dates of the events or the ages of the participants. It does not seem to have mattered if these sources did give the correct dates and ages. How many reviews or criticisms of Richard III point out that he was but twelve years old at the time of Act III in ‘Henry VI’, Part III ? It seems to support the adage that myth is more powerful than truth.

A character called John Morton appears in the plays 'Henry VI, Part III' and 'Richard III' as the Bishop of Ely which John Morton was, appointed so by Edward IV, to whose side he conveniently switched after the defeat of Henry VI under whom he held several ecclesiastical offices having switched to the priesthood from being a lawyer. It is in the second part of Henry VI that the rebel Dick Butcher says, “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers” The first action of Edward the Fourth was to send Morton on a diplomatic mission to France where Morton took a bribe of 2000 francs from the French king. When Morton returned to England, he himself turned rebel or was the prime instigator and chief planner of a scheme to overthrow King Richard III by means of Edward's widow where she and her large family of relatives would hold every office or avenue of power. In the play, 'Henry VI, Part III', Act III, Scene ii, King Edward woos the woman whom he would have as his Queen, Lady Grey. This woman was Elizabeth Woodville, a widow at the time, and whom Edward IV married in 1464, but secretly. He was twenty two, she was twenty seven. In the play, Richard, along with his brother Clarence, is privy to the conversation between Edward and his future Queen and then, in soliloquy, Richard makes his plans to seize the crown. In reality, Elizabeth Woodville was Edward's wife for nineteen years !

Since Thomas More was born in 1478, he would have been only from five to seven years old during Richard's short reign. Although it is believed that this 'Life' was written about 1513, it was not printed until 1557 long after More's death. The publisher, William Rastell, a relative of More by marriage, claimed that this version in English was in More's ‘own hand' but this has disappeared. A Latin manuscript exists but it is not in More's hand.

If Richard were the covetous, grasping, murdering villain as portrayed in the plays, nineteen years seems an inordinate length of time to exert his impatient fury to seize the crown. This alone should have been enough to hint that the whole scene was not only obvious fiction but not even barely possible for at the time of Edward's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, Richard was a mere boy of twelve and Clarence only slightly older !

These alone would provide Elizabeth with the greatest personal power in the realm but she wanted that power to be more than temporary. She prepared the same vow as the theatrical Richard, there would be no unlooked for issue between her family and the Crown, and the first on her list to dispose of was George, the Duke of Clarence !

The eldest of Edward's two young sons, Edward and Richard, was heir to the throne, and Gloster, who was appointed their guardian and Protector, swore the nobles of the area to allegiance to twelve year old Edward the Fifth, and marched with six hundred loyal followers into London preparing to crown the boy in a state ceremony, after wresting the boy from the possession of the Woodvilles, Earl Rivers and Lord Grey, who had conspired to name themselves as Protectors and to kill Gloster. They were both executed for conspiracy after young Edward was rescued from them.

If there ever was a character as portrayed by the play's Gloster, it was the real Elizabeth Woodville, but she operated in a far different manner. She held her husband Edward fast within soft bonds, always influencing by yielding with sweet words, controlling him with compliance, binding him to her machinations but devious in her delicate but determined way.

When the play's Richard says, “Plots have I laid to set my brother Clarence and the king in deadly hate, the one against the other”, it is really Elizabeth Woodville, the Queen, who was conceiving ‘the inductions dangerous, by drunken prophecies, libels and dreams’. In laying the plot to rid herself of her husband's family, she either knew or suspected that Clarence was aware of the secret about Edward that would rob her of continued power. The fear of that secret urged Edward to allow him to yield to Elizabeth's prompting to condemn his brother quickly. The King's mother, the Duchess of York, who also knew the secret, and Richard, the Duke of Gloster, who was not aware of it, both pleaded with Edward not to execute his brother, George, the Duke of Clarence. When both failed, Richard swore to revenge the death of Clarence and he directed his vengeance on the Woodvilles. He was twenty five in that year of 1478. Yet he was powerless for five more years at the end of which time Edward died at the age of forty one.

The coronation was to be held during the following month of June. Then Gloster, most probably by speaking with his mother, the Duchess of York, learned for the first time of the secret about Edward. As much as the people were incensed by Edward marrying a woman with children by a previous marriage, they did not realize that Edward before marrying Elizabeth had plighted his troth to Lady Eleanor Butler, daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury, with a contract of marriage that was legal in that century, witnessed by the Dean of St. Martin's, Dr. Robert Stillington.

Edward was 'licentious in the extreme' as a French diplomat reported, and Elizabeth, his wife, encouraged his infidelities by supplying him, as fellow libertines, her own brother and her two sons by her previous marriage. While Edward was so grossly occupied with his satiric excesses, Elizabeth rapidly widened her range of regal power by elevating her family to influential wealth. She compromised two Lords, three Earls and the Duke of Buckingham by marrying her six sisters to them. Her five brothers were exalted to positions of nobility or influence, one as commander of the army, one of the fleet and another was made the Bishop of Salisbury. Even the brother of her former husband was made a Viscount. Of her two sons, one was created Marquis of Dorset and the other, Lord Grey, and both appear in the play, Richard III, as does Lord Rivers, her eldest brother, and Lord Hastings, both of whom openly shared Edward's most famous mistress, Jane Shore, who is also mentioned in the play. Lord Hastings arranged with Elizabeth for his daughter to marry Lord Rivers, her brother.

Never at any time were the ‘two princes' a threat to Richard's crown. Richard, more for their protection from the Woodvilles at this crucial time, gave the two 'princes' apartments in the Tower for he had every reason to guard them against the Woodvilles and had no reason to put the princes to death. The Woodvilles, under the guidance and planning of John Morton, enticed a willing Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, exiled in France, to invade England and, supported by one of the brothers in law of Elizabeth Woodville, Henry led an uprising against the crowned King Richard III, finally killing him in the Battle of Bosworth Fields in August 1485.

Henry Tudor, the great grandson of the illegitimate son of John of Gaunt, son of Edward III, was promised as his bride, Elizabeth the daughter of Elizabeth Woodville and the sister of the two ‘princes’ in order to further secure his right to the throne which otherwise was nebulous. It was Henry's only way to the throne and young Elizabeth's illegitimacy was legally reversed when Henry married her, but this also reversed the illegitimacy of the two princes in the Tower and immediately the eldest, Edward the Fifth, became the rightful heir to the throne.

Whether or not Edward actually married Lady Eleanor, as Dr. Stillington stated that he did, it mattered not. The trothplight was sufficient to make his marriage to Elizabeth bigamous and so the two young princes, Edward and Richard, had no legal claim whatever to the throne, nor did their sister Elizabeth as they were all children of Edward by Elizabeth Woodville.

Richard, Duke of Gloster, could make no choice or declaration as Dr. Stillington revealed this information at a Council meeting early in the month. With Clarence dead and his only son also illegitimate, the next in line to the throne was Richard himself.

There was only one answer, the two princes had to be killed. Upon Richard's death, Henry, the Earl of Richmond became Henry VII.

The most convincing evidence that Richard did not order the death of the Princes in the Tower lies in the public accusations that Henry VII made against Richard after the Battle of Bosworth Fields. Henry accused Richard of a long list of crimes and injustices except one, he made no mention of the death of the two Princes indicating that they were still alive in the Tower. Henry would leave the accusation that Richard killed them to be written into history by the one to whom he owed his crown as King and whom he had raised to Archbishop of Canterbury, the clever schemer, John Morton.

Robert Payne, in his Book (P304), has in mind what William Shaxper looked like in his mentioning of William’s brother, Edmund. Little is known of this brother, only that which is in the official church records. One is in the burial register of St Giles Church dated August 12 1607, “Edward, son of Edward Shackspeere, player, base born”. This is thought to be Edmund’s son, Edward, not “son of Edward Shackspeere” as printed, as Edmund’s illegitimate son, Edward, is buried in Cripplegate, just outside the walls from William’s alleged Silver Street residence south of London’s north walls. Edmund was buried on December 31st of that same year at St Saviour’s Church in Southwark. The burial register reads: “Edmond Shakespeare A player in the Church”. The fee book of the church reads: “Edmond Shakspeare A player buried in the Church with a forenoon knell of the great bell xx”. Seemingly ‘xx’ represents the number of shillings, and the burial fee was two shillings and for the ringing of the lesser bell, one shilling. Twenty shillings would have provided for an elaborate funeral including the ringing of the Great Bell. In the fee book, the name is pronounced ‘Shax per’

The burial register of St Giles, above, dated August 12 1607 is confusing as it lists brother Edmond as ‘Edward Shackspeere, player, base born’ whereas it is Edward who is base born and Edmund who is ‘player’ as Edmund is also listed in the burial register, St Saviour’s as being “A player in the BiographerChurch’.Payne says of Edmund, the brother of William Shaxper, “We may imagine that he possessed some resemblance to Shakespeare, with red hair, a high forehead, long nose and sensualPaynemouth.”isimagining that the brother of the man from Stratford resembles a portrait that he must know is not of that person as it was found by Sir William Davenant a half century after Stratford William had died. His description does not fit the lifelike bust of William in the Holy Trinity Church at Stratford and certainly not the primitive print by Doeshout in the First Folio. It is completely compatible to another portrait in colour found in the ‘Complete Shakespeare’ 1939 by Books, Inc.’ but not the Chandos portrait, not the Felton, not the Flower, that are some of the many ‘portraits’ that ‘turned up’ in the 18th and 19h centuries. Although thirty four possible spellings of ‘Shakespeare’ have been listed, throughout those printed references to ‘W. S.’ as the author, the name has had but three spellings. All but two have the full eleven letter spelling of ‘Shakespeare’. One omits the final ‘e’ and another omits the first ‘e’ as in ‘Shakspeare’. Several other credits consist only the initials ‘W. S.’. There are no instances of ‘Shax’, ‘Shacks’ or ‘per’. Since spellings were governed by the sound of the words, the number of variations in names was limited in each name’s case. The ‘Shax’ or ‘Shacks’ were separate from the ‘Shakes’ by the opposing sounds for the short and long ‘A’. The August 12 1607 entry reads “Edward, son of Edward Shackspeere, player, base born”. This is a spelling never given to ‘W. S.’ with both ‘Shack’ and ‘speere’ and this is Edward not Edmund, however similar or ‘interchangeable’ the spellings are as Robert Payne claims on P303. Payne also quotes, P338, an entry in the burial register of St Clement Danes in London: “Jane Shackspeer daughter of Willm 8 Aug. 1609”. This is a similar spelling to the St Giles entry and as dissimilar to any referring to ‘W. S’. The naming of the father may suggest an infant. Still neither the age of the base born Edward nor the age of Jane is known. There is always the question of how many William Shakespeares were in London and was there also a William Shackspeer in London ? A documented search for one who owed money found no one by that name, when ‘W.S.’ was supposed at his fame’s height.

THE VISION OF WILLIAM Robert J. Meyer

How much can one extract like a magician’s multi coloured but endless ribbon from this single word ‘player’ ? Edmund, if he really were William’s brother from Stratford, is named a “player in the Church” but is this at St Saviours. How much could he be ‘in his brother’s shadow’ when there is not as much known of the ‘Poet William’ in London as there is by this brief entry about Edmund. How dark a shadow did William cast, stirring as few as no rays of comment as he did and if Edmund had already made his upward climb, his lowliness was his young ambition’s ladder whereto when he once attained whatever heights that he did, as the owner of his haberdashery in London, he may have scorned the base shadow from which he did ascend.Still

William’s brother, ‘Edmond’, was buried at St Saviours, south of the Thames and this is in London. If Edward, base born, were his son, he would be buried four months earlier than Edmond, but why far north and over the river in Cripplegate at St Giles ? People usually were buried where they belonged to or frequented the church in their own parish. Brother Edmund was buried in London as he was a haberdasher in London. St Clement Danes is in the Strand, west of Middle Temple at the small street called Clements Inn, near Arundel Street where Edmund Spenser’s daughter was baptized in 1552 and John Donne’s wife was buried in 1617. St Clement Danes is so called because King Harold, son of King Canutus by a concubine is buried there. He was originally buried at Westminster but, Hardicanutus, the lawful son of Canutus “commanded the body of Harold to be digged out of the earth and to be thrown into the Thames where it was by a fisherman taken up and buried in this churchyard”. (John Stow, P397) This church is in yet another parish of London and if Jane were William’s daughter by an unknown woman, it is reasonable that she would not have been taken to Stratford but, still, her name was the rare ‘Shackspeer’. Payne says: “Of Edmund Shakespeare’s life we know nothing at all, but the fact that we know nothing is itself a clue to his way of living. It signifies that he lived wholly in his brother’s shadow and suggests that he was perfectly content to live in this way.”

more fanciful ribbon emerges from Robert Payne: “That he was called a ‘player’ means that he was enrolled among the players of the Globe Theatre, played minor roles, and occupied himself with the business of the theatre. He had not yet reached a position where he would be featured among ‘the principal players’ and he evidently possessed no gifts as a dramatist”.Allof this unravels from the tiny word ‘player’, but Payne does not acknowledge that he is listed as, ‘A player in the Church’ and not to the Theatre Stage. The name, ‘William Shake speare’ was not so listed as a ‘player’ in any church records upon his death and the name is not listed in any church records as having been born anywhere but from that absence he has risen in the eyes and books of the biographers as a ‘player’, ‘playwright’, ‘director of plays’, ‘sharer’ and ‘owner of theatre buildings’ and of ‘Shakespeare’s company’. All ‘contemporary’ people are denigrated to William’s advantage and all with no substance whatever. Why would Edmund necessarily have ‘enrolled’ at the Globe as if it were a theatre school and why is the Globe singled out when there were other theatre companies. Biographer Payne also believes that there were underlings who played ‘minor roles’. In all ‘companies’, then and ever since, all actors played principal and minor roles but what are ‘minor roles’, the gate keeper in ‘Macbeth’ ?

“Knock, knock who’s there i’ the other devil’s name ?” Launcelot Gobbo a minor role ? “I will run, fiend, I will run.” The ever present ‘Horatio’ is a minor role, “What’s that, my lord ?” “E’en so ” “E’en so.”

3 If Edmund had been a ‘principal player’, would his burial register have read: “Edmund Shackespear, lead player at the Rose in pastoral comical, historical pastoral, and tragical farcical-hysterical roles” and since the Lord Mayor of London is listed as ‘mercer’ does that thereby imply that ‘he evidently possessed no gifts’ as an expert Primero player ?

Thomas Lodge wrote a romantic Play, ‘Rosalynde’ on which ‘As You Like It’ takes its plot. There was no character in ‘Rosalynde’ called Jacques. There are two Jacques in ‘As You Like It’, one a ‘Lord attending upon the Duke in his Banishment’, the other one, ‘of three sons of Sir Rowland de Bois’. Some believe that this is a reference to Jonson.

WHO WROTE THE PLAYS ? Robert J. Meyer

The ‘Hamlet’ of 1594 was by Thomas Kyd and this Play is now ‘lost’. It was popular as was his ‘Jeronimo’ as his ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ was known. Phrases from the Plays became catchwords in the streets of London: ‘Heironimo, go by, go by’ was one phrase. ‘Hamlet, revenge’ was another. Thomas Lodge said of this original Hamlet, ‘The Visard of ye ghost which cried so miserably at ye Theatre like an oister wife, ‘Hamlet, revenge’.” The Folio version of this phrase: “Hamlet: Speak, I am bound to hear. Ghost: So art thou to revenge when thou shalt hear. If thou didst ever thy dear father love.” “Hamlet: O God ! Ghost: Revenge this foul and most unnatural murder…. Hamlet, remember me.”

Among the many ‘mysteries of the Plays’ is the obvious contrast in the wording of the Quarto of a Play and its version as found in the First Folio that is repeated in modern issues. Biographers throughout the 20th century excuse the differences upon ‘stolen and incorrect copies’ dictated from bad memories of actors of those who ‘sold or delivered them’ to the publisher or printer of the Quarto. Author Halliday says that William “wrote rapidly” and with little alteration and that “there was usually no need for him to make a fair copy” This implies that there was a one and only original script to each Play, yet he says “Sometimes the prompter or a professional scribe made a fair copy”, without giving any indication that ‘prompters’ existed at that time. The entire cast could not have memorized and rehearsed from one copy of the script, so other than the existing copies of those Plays published in Quarto there are not known original manuscripts or copies made by whatever means. All of the notes of the author, the ‘poor copy’ manuscripts provided to the printers of the Quartos and the ‘original manuscripts’ used in the printing of the First Folio are not in existence and this is another of the ‘mysteries of the Plays’.

The notes ascribed to ‘Heminge and Condell’ in the 1632 Folio include, “His mind and hand went together, and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers”. This is the flattering but unlikely tribute to the author’s ‘greatness’ ignoring that what they ‘received’ could have been a carefully copied duplicate of the original script. There is no mention that these papers were ‘received’ from the author personally

There are few biographer’s comments on the wording of these still available Quartos or on the words heard during a performance at that time. Forman’s report on a ‘Macbeth’ performance indicates that he heard a version that differed greatly in content as well as the wording found in the First Folio version. Ben Jonson believed in realism and was therefore an ‘anti romantic’. Much in the Plays bothered him and sometimes seemed ludicrous to him. He would answer some of his objections in his own plays In ‘Every Man out of his Humour’, one of his comedies, the phrase, ‘Et tu, Brute’ is a line for laughter. Another line is: ‘Reason long since is fled to animals’ that echoes Antony’s “O judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason”. Jonson also complained of the sheer nonsense in several lines from the Plays. “William”, has he saw it, “Many times fell into those things could not escape laughter as when he said in the person of Caesar, Cassius speaking to him: ‘Caesar, thou dost me wrong’. And Caesar replies ‘Caesar never did wrong, but with just cause’; and such like which were ridiculous”. In the Folio version, that line now reads, “Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause will he be satisfied”. Was this line and possibly others altered to satisfy sense, and if so, who re wrote the words, and were there other changes ?

To illustrate the preciseness and the credit given to playwrights is the title page of the first tragedy play and also the first play written in blank verse, this is the title page in its entirety of a play written at an ‘earlier time’ before the births of Marlowe and Stratford William.

Recent textual scholarship tends to undermine the authority of the First Folio in calling for a broader consideration of all previous versions of a drama in conjunction with the Folio text.

‘The Taming of A Shrew’ is thought to be a ‘bad quarto’ of ‘The Taming of THE Shrew’. ‘The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two famous Houses of York and Lancaster’ and ‘The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York’, first thought as sources for ‘2 and 3 Henry VI’, now are considered to be ‘bad quartos’. ‘The Troublesome Reign of King John’ is now thought to be a ‘bad quarto’ for ‘King John’. A ‘Fair Copy’ is now the name for a corrected copy of an author’s manuscript that was submitted to an acting company. A drama would be corrected and revised either by the author or by a professional scribe at a later date. Eventually, the ‘fair copy’ would be modified by a bookkeeper or Prompter to include ‘noises off’, set properties and stage directions, and then be transcribed into the company’s Prompt Book. All of these are the suppositions of modern ‘experts and scholars’ inventing these reasons to try to include some known copies.

The second Issue of the 3rd Folio included seven Plays including ‘Pericles’ as were added ‘Two Noble Kinsmen’ 1634, ‘Cardenio’ 1653, ‘Henry I’, ‘Henry II’ 1653, ‘Birth of Merlin’ 1662, ‘Sir Thomas More’ and ‘Edward III’. Others were: ‘The Troublesome Reign of K. John’, ‘Arden of Faversham’, ‘Fair Em’, ‘The Merry Devil of Edmonton’, ‘Mucedorus’, ‘The Second Maiden’s Tragedy’ and ‘Edmund Ironside’. Has no one placed any of these plays upon the board in modern times ? Why were these ‘plays’ included in ‘second issue of the 3rd Folio’, and upon whose authority and why then were they not ‘claimed’ to be by ‘W.S.’ before and why are they not in the Collected Plays ‘today’ ? Whatever the answer, why is ‘Pericles’ still in modern versionsWith? the lack of information about the identity of the claimed ‘author’ of, first, the several Quartos published with various spellings of the name of ‘W.S.’ and later with the First Folio of 1623 that included Plays that were not before credited to that name, the mystery of the Author continued when someone supposed that the name applied to a resident of Stratford even though no one in that man’s lifetime credited him with writing as little as a letter. No connection between the Man from Stratford and the Plays has been established leading to at least two persons who openly forged additions to existing documents without detection for many months in one case and for decades in the case of the latter.

The lack of an author’s name on many of the Quartos that were published and later credited to ‘W.S.’ elicited the excuse from biographers that an author’s name on a publication was not considered important “at those early times”.

When the First Folio was printed, a woodcut was imprinted within the book. Since there existed no portrait of the ‘Author’, some claim was made that Ben Jonson had credited the ‘artist’ on the exactness of the likeness to the author. Biographers have since claimed that Ben Jonson knew the author personally from a comment that Jonson had scribbled on some note paper that was found in his effects after his demise, but this was a comment that means no more than he liked the work published under that name and he was never known to mention the word ‘William’ in reference to ‘the author’.

Lincoln Inn Fields Theatre was a London Patent Theatre converted from a tennis court by Sir William Davenant for his acting company, ‘The Duke of York’s Servants’, in June of 1661. It was the first theatre containing moveable scenery and a proscenium arch. His was one of the first companies to cast women in women’s parts instead of casting young boys in those roles. In 1671, Devenant moved to Dorset Gardens. Covent Garden Theatre was built in 1732 by John Rich who moved his company from Lincoln Inn Fields Theatre to this new facility.

Drury Lane Theatre was originally called Theatre Royal in Bridges Street. This playhouse opened in 1663 by Thomas Killigrew for his company, ‘The King’s Servants’. Yet, the glossary of ‘Shakespeare Criticism’ says, “Thomas Killigrew and his company performed in 1673 1674 at the Lincoln Inn Fields Theatre before moving to Drury Lane Theatre”. Thomas Betterton and his company moved into the L.I.F. Theatre that continued to be the site of theatrical productions until 1732 The Swan Theatre was built in 1585 1586, by Frances Langley

Several publications in the 19th and 20th century have challenged the concept that William of Stratford was the Author of the Plays. In 1857, Delia Salter Bacon published her book, “Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded” in which she attributed the Plays to three writers, Edmund Spenser, 1552 1599, Sir Walter Raleigh, 1552 1618, and Francis Bacon, 1561 1626, the latter of whom she was a descendant. The Bacon claim is mainly due to a few passages in the Plays being similar to passages in Bacon’s works, and the passages she cites in the book are mostly phrases in common use at the ‘Thetime.Great Cryptogram’,1888, by Ignatius Donnelly, 1831 1901, claims that the Bacon authorship can be authenticated due to a code or cipher disclosing Bacon’s identity as the writer detected in the Plays. The evidence is tenuous and difficult to demonstrate.

‘The Murder of the Man who was Shakespeare’ 1955, by Calvin Hoffman, puts forward the concept that Marlowe did not die as believed in 1593 and continued to write away from England after being charged with heresy in the spring of 1593.

“The Tragedie of Gorbodvc, whereof three Actes were written by Thomas Norton and the two laste by Thomas Sackuyle. Sett forthe as the same was shewed before the Qvenes most excellent Maiestie, in her highnes Court of Whitehall, the xviii day of January, Anno Domini, 1561, by the Gentlemen of Thynner Temple in London, [Symbol of Gryphon] Imprinted at London in Fletestrete at the Signe of the Faucon by William Griffith and are to be sold at his Shop in Sainte Dunstones Churchyarde in the West of London, Anno 1565, Septem 22”.

In biographies as late as that of Samuel Johnson (1709 84), there is little understanding of the theatre scene in the London of 1600. Dr Johnson does not mention even one theatre by name and in his retelling of the ‘Horse Handling’ tale he gives no indication of the number of theatres operating at that time referring only to “at the theatre”. The forgery mentioning the activity at the Blackfriars theatre also gives the wrong impression of its activity in 1589.

The Blackfriars was originally a part of a large monastery. In 1576, it was leased to Richard Farrant for the ‘Master of the Children of Windsor’. In 1596, the Burbadge family took over the theatre building and Farrant then made it into a theatre for the ‘Children of the Chapel’. In 1605, King James I suspended productions there because of the play, ‘Westward Ho’ by Ben Jonson and shortly afterwards, the Children of the Chapel productions were suspended for the Play production of George Chapman’s ‘Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron’. Richard Burbadge began the adult actor productions there in 1608.

Francis Bacon, born 1561, only three years older than Marlowe, after graduating from Trinity College, Cambridge, was elected to the House of Commons in 1584 at 23. Bacon was a very busy lawyer and parliamentarian, almost constantly involved with the Monarch and the Commons and his private practice of Law. Bacon wrote letters of sound advice to the Queen but his advice was never implemented. He opposed a bill for a Royal subsidy and lost favour in 1593. He regained favour on the accession of James I and knighted on July 23, 1603 and was made a commissioner for his proposal of the union of England with Scotland. His ‘Advancement of Learning’ 1605, was presented to James I. Appointed as Solicitor General in 1607, he attended the session of the first parliament in 1611. He informed James that he was willing to devote himself to the King’s interest and undertook in Parliament to reconcile differences the between Crown and Commons in 1612.

Calvin Hoffman claimed that Marlowe wrote “under the name of Shakespeare”. It appears that it was the intention of no one to ‘write under’ this name as there was no consistent use of the name. Most of the Plays now claimed under the First Folio were never previously published ‘under the name’ of anyone. Only one of the first five Plays bore the name. At least one play that is not now credited to that name did bear that name as author. The name appearing or not appearing had no relevance to the author of each play. ‘Pericles’ was not in the First Folio but is included today. The Plays not printed by 1609 were printed in the 1623 Folio.

During the 1930s, the name ‘George Spelvin’ appeared in the cast listed in the programs of many Plays in New York City. There was no person called ‘George Spelvin’. It was an in joke. Edward DeVere, 1550 1604, the 17th Earl of Oxford is also claimed to be the author by his descendant, Lord Charles Burford.

An article written by Bentley Boyd in the Chicago Tribune and printed in the Hamilton Spectator, August 17, 1989, stated that William Hunt, a retired trader from the Chicago Board of Trade, made an offer of $5000.00 U.S. funds to anyone who could provide evidence that the ‘Shakespeare’ who lived at Stratford wrote the Plays. Hunt never was parted with the $5000. The Stratford man’s name was ‘Shacksper’ or ‘Shaxper’. Names, then, were written as pronounced.

To examine the three poets whom Delia Salter Bacon claimed wrote the Plays: Edmund Spenser was a poet, born in London and educated at Cambridge and was 27 when he wrote his first major poem, ‘Shepherdes Calendar’ in 1579, the year he entered service to Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester. Later, he was secretary to Arthur Grey, 14th Baron Grey. He lived in Ireland where the first three books of ‘The Faerie Queene’ were written. He intended that there would be 12 books. He had no patron. He published at least five other large collections of poetry from 1591 to 1596, the time of the Early Plays. When his house in Ireland was sacked and burned in 1598 he fled to London where he died in 1599 long before most of the major Plays were written.

Walter Ralegh, as the name was spelled, would have been 41 when Marlowe disappeared from the scene in 1593. Five of the Plays were produced by 1598. Ralegh was placed into the Tower of London in 1592 and was released and sent to the Orinoco in 1595. He made an attack on Cadiz in 1596 and was returned to favour by the Queen. He was foremost a courtier, explorer and then was banished to the Tower again in 1603 for the rest of his life where he wrote his ‘History of the World’. He made experiments in science and wrote of them until 1616. He was executed in 1618. It is inconceivable that Ralegh had the time in his well documented life to have written 36 plays or even 8 plays beyond his known works and duties that he performed. Delia Bacon claimed that he was only one of three who wrote the Plays. If two others were also the authors of the Plays, this does not explain how two or three authors could write in a manner that could not be detected as the writings of three individuals whose other writings are open for comparisons to vocabulary, style and ease of writing comedy and tragedy in the drama medium.

“Marlowe could have gone to anywhere on the continent without changing his identity and he could have continued to write under his own name without fear of apprehension, trial or execution. People like Bacon or Marlowe were world figures, respected and honoured for their ability anywhere in Europe and, if wanted for treason in England could live without fear of being touched. Mary, Queen of the Scots, for example, was quite immune from prosecution until she entered into England and the jurisdiction of Elizabeth.”

The initial reaction of today’s Professor when presented with the suggestion that ‘Marlowe wrote the Plays credited to William’ was a sudden “I cannot accept that”, followed by several ‘reasons’ why “it is quite apparent that William wrote his own Plays”.

He was appointed Attorney General in 1613 and became Privy Councillor in 1616. Appointed Lord Chancellor in 1618 and raised to peerage as Baron Verulam he was created Viscount Saint Albans in 1621. He was charged with accepting bribes, fined and imprisoned until September 1621 when he was pardoned, but prohibited from returning to Court or to Parliament.Hewrote

Francis Bacon was imprisoned on the charge of bribery and then pardoned but he was formerly welcomed in the Royal Court and was a member of the government and rose to the office of Lord Chancellor before being charged so his rank in the country did not prevent that charge and Walterimprisonment.Raleghwastwice placed into a Tower dungeon room and finally beheaded. Between those imprisonments, he was released and given a mission to perform far out of the country to Orinoco. He knew that James I did not like him and being a good sailor and with his official connections, he could have left the country and settled almost anywhere including the colony that he helped to establish in Virginia, thus escaping the wrath of the King, a long impending imprisonment again in the Tower and eventual execution but he did not.

As in his previous plays, Marlowe could continue to form passionate characters that are destined to destruction by their excessive desire for power in his resonant beauty of language.

Bacon began writing in volumes from 1605 when he was 44 which is not an opportune time to begin to be a great dramatist and these Plays for 400 years have been claimed as the Greatest Plays by the Greatest Author and not by someone who wrote them in his spare time.

‘Novum Organum’ published 1620, ‘History of Henry VII’ and Latin translation of ‘Advancement’ 1622, ‘Maxims of Law’ 1630, and ‘Reading on the Stature of Uses’ 1642.

It was not ‘necessary’, then, for Marlowe, with the threat of being constantly under the charge of ‘heresy’ and required to report daily to the officials in London during a plague, to have taken advantage of the opportunity to be declared dead at the Inn and then forgotten while he escapes to Scotland where he had stated he would be more respected ? Marlowe could not trust the Law that had placed him once in a London prison for defending himself from the sword thrust of a stranger in the street and now he was under threat of execution for the indefensible charge of ‘heresy’. Becoming lost to the rest of the world in Scotland, he could continue to write plays about former Kings of England as his ‘Harey vj’ and ‘Edward II’ never knowing or caring that they would eventually be credited to a man in Stratford.

All of the great Elizabethan dramatists began writing in their very early twenties and wrote plays and poetry almost exclusively and none was active in any other major duties. Bacon was constantly being upgraded in rank in recognition of his duties in parliament. His major and timeconsuming writing began around 1620 long after the last of the Plays had seen their premieres.

Francis Bacon was too busy in the public eye to be a part time ‘Greatest Dramatist’.

Other prominent knights and Earls also were incarcerated at the Tower who also could have easily fled the country including the Earl of Essex and the Earl of Southampton being the best known, but none of them fled the country.

Marlowe was famous in London but only as a play-writer. He was a friend of the nephew of the realm’s most powerful man, Walsingham, but that did not save him from the charge of heresy and the command that he appear every day before the court in London and the order went out that he was to be brought in from Walsingham’s estate south of Greenwich.

His defence was weak as they had the statement from Kyd taken under torture that the ‘paper’ found in his room belonged to Marlowe. The chance of his being cleared of the charge of heresy was very slim. It was the most serious charge and as with many others so charged, it was impossible for him to establish innocence.

The best defence with his supporters was to be ‘declared dead’ and those in attendance in the room at the Inn at Deptford were known ‘spies’ in the employ of Walsingham’s uncle who were to be in Europe on the day they were at the Inn and they could have been there only under the express order of their employer. No reason of why both of these men were there has been recorded and no reason has been forwarded as to why Marlowe would have been a mile or so west of Greenwich at Deptford that day from morning to evening when he was charged to appear before the court at London north of the Thames River, pronounced to rhyme with ‘names’.

“Are you saying that Heminge and Condell forged William’s name to the Plays ?”

By asking this, the Professor betrays his misunderstanding of the names of ‘Heminge and Condell’ printed in the Folio. He calls them ‘Heminge’ and Condell, in the manner as it is printed still in the collections of the Plays whereas the name was ‘John Heminges’ which is known only by reading other books. Also misunderstood is that the Professor believes as so many others do that their names were in the First Folio of 1623 whereas the names did not appear until the 1632 Folio. Heminges and Condell had no hand in presenting the Plays to the printer or in editing the Folio and so there was no ‘forging’ of a name possible, only another mystery of why this Dedication was delayed until, or composed explicitly for, the 1632 edition of the Folio. Was it placed there at that late date because there had been doubts as to who was ‘W.S.’ and some association with the Burbadge players was to be established and that these ‘surviving’ players ‘knew the identity’ of the Author and were now giving personal testament to that knowledge. Whether this was the intention it has proved to be the result. Later biographers and men of letters knew these two names and that of Richard Burbadge as an actor but most of the other actors and Cuthbert Burbadge became almost unknown as their names were rarely mentioned.Thepractice of crediting a printed work to a person who did not write the work was not unusual up to 1623 and well beyond as new plays were credited to ‘W.S.’ well into the 1660s. It was not considered ‘forgery’. The printer would not know nor need to know who the true author was. He would not demand proof of the authenticity of an author. What was printed in the crediting was the responsibility of the publisher and each may have his own reasons for what he ordered to be printed.

In the early 17th century as with other previous eras, the average age excluding violent deaths was fairly constant and anyone at the age of 52 was not ‘an old man’ or woman ‘in those days’. In Elizabethan and Jacobean times, the devastation taken by war alone had a greater effect on the national ‘average age expectancy’ than the two world wars during the 20th century. In any of the battles since 1960, the casualties never came as high as the mortalities due to automobile accidents. Plague in England could take as high as a quarter of any community’s population as it did in Stratford during William’s youth.

This is a common misconception constantly surfacing in the present that mistakenly confuses ‘average age’ and ‘average age expectancy’ with the actual age to which people lived. ‘Age expectancy’ averages the ages of all those who have recently passed and applies it to a newborn. If the ‘average age expectancy’ is 48, there can be three people who live to 78 for every two children who die before the age of three. The average ‘age expectancy’ around the year 1900 rose suddenly, and more for the drop in number of deaths of babies and mothers during childbirth due to sterilization of the hands of physicians and attendants than for any other cause. The average age at death remained the same but rose gradually throughout the 20th century due to better food and great advancements in dentistry, surgery and pharmacy.

“The First Folio was an unprecedented feat for those times to publish a book of that type and size.”Bythis, as the Professor explains, the printing of the Folio showed how important the author was and how unique the greatness of the works that he had written. when many ‘firsts’ were accomplished in English literature, the first decades of writing plays as well as dramatic and epic poetry in English rather than in Latin. This age found the first narrative poems, the first works in blank verse, the first theatrical story telling plays in English and the first plays performed in theatres rather than variety shows of jugglers on platforms in villages. However ‘monumental’ the publishing task of the First Folio may have been, it was not ‘unprecedented’, as the Professor believes, as he may not be aware that it was not the first published collection of Plays by one author in English. That ‘unprecedented feat’ was performed for and by Ben Jonson when all of his plays written up to that time were published in a book of ‘that type and size’ seven years before in 1616, the event that may have ‘inspired’ the publication of the First Folio when it was clearly demonstrated that such a work was possible.

“William when he died was, what, 52 ? This was the age of an old man in those days.”

“William was part owner of the theatre company and gave great presentations to his Plays.”This belief can only be sustained by reading the claims of biographers and the only foundation for claiming that he was ‘part-owner’ is the Blackfriars ‘document’ that stated that he was a ‘sharer’ along with named actors and with the names of those who were not actors including Ben Jonson who was not a member but this information may not have been known by the forger who included it, possibly, as he knew that the name was known by many in the 19th century when he forged the paper. From this fraud, the biographers continued to build the duties or accomplishments of William into ‘director’ and ‘producer’ until he was now ‘giving great presentations of his Plays’. All came from the word ‘sharer’ as if buying a share in the company made the sharer ‘a part owner’ that gave him managerial authority. Only Richard and his brother Cuthbert owned and managed the company after the demise of their father.

Many of the Playwrights lived into their 60’s and 70s. “But they were exceptions. No, it is statistically proven that the average age in the 17th century was quite low.”

Quarto printings of Plays appeared from 1595 to 1613 with a credit to the initials ‘W.S’ that were not in the Folio, ‘Locrine’, ‘Cromwell’, ‘The Puritan’ while others were credited as ‘By W. Shakespeare’, ‘London Prodigal’, The Yorkshire Tragedy’, and three Plays in 1600 ‘By Will Shakespeare’, ‘King Stephen’, ‘Duke Humphrey and ‘Iplish Tantha’. Many of the Plays were never published in Quarto form and appeared for the first time in the Folio that would be the first time anyone had been informed that these, too, were by ‘W.S.’ These Plays had no previous editions with which to be compared for content or for style including ‘Macbeth’ that happens to be a Play that a description of the plot witnessed in early production does exist today and in which there are many discrepancies with the printed Play

If William of Stratford is supposed to have been a playwright, he then must be compared to playwrights and poets of the era ending at 1640. The bright young poet playwrights all died too young and so did not live full lives. Sir Philip Sidney was killed in war at 32. Kyd and Peele died at 38, Greene at 32, Nashe at 34. However, living full lives were Dekker at 60, Bacon at 65, Lodge and Heywood at 67, Drayton at 68, Chapman at 75 and Ben Jonson at 65 who saw his own collection of Plays published and the Second Folio. There can be no excuse for William to have ceased writing in 1609 at the age of 45 as being ‘too old’. No other writer quit writing until death dropped his pen. The Author, of course, did die at some unknown date but the mystery still remains of who ‘that person’ was. Why were the Plays of the First Folio chosen from all of the Plays written whether or not they had previously been credited to the name ‘W.S.’. Some of the Plays chosen for the Folio were previously credited to ‘W.S’ but some previously credited were not. Most that were chosen were not so previously credited. ‘Pericles’, not chosen for the First Folio, was added later. Many of the ‘early Plays’ had titles that were used by known playwrights as Kyd and Marlowe “But the Plays of Shakespeare have a style, a definite style completely unlike any other authors including Marlowe.”

there is no mention or comment upon whether all of the Quarto versions also have the imprint of one author, one unmistakable style that is ‘completely unlike any other author’ or is it that the full length Folio version only has that special ‘style’ that is considered the work of ‘one author only’. How is it that all of the Plays written over at least 19 years have that same style and all are now considered senior work and that not one has the markings of a tyro playwright ?

The Professor has mentioned the most important mystery. How have all of these ‘chosen Plays’ the ‘same style’ when written over a considerable period of time and all are claimed to be ‘completely unlike’ any of the other authors who had written titles on the same subjects supposedly taken from the same historical source of the ‘Holinshed Chronicles’ in which the Folio version quotes some entire lines verbatim as did Marlowe quote verbatim from Holinshed and these verbatim lines are also in the Quartos that the scholars and biographers call ‘bad copies’ of the ‘originals’. All the Quarto ‘versions’ differ from the claimed ‘originals’ in the Folio.As is noticed in the comparison of the Quarto ‘version’ of Hamlet to the Folio ‘original’, the Quarto version has less than the Folio in exposition on certain lines. This is very evident in the speech of Gloster in ‘King Henry VI, 3rd Part’, “Aye, Edward will use women honourably.” The Folio ‘original’ 72 lines of this speech do not appear in the Quarto at that great length. In the Quarto, the essence is complete but omits the rhapsodizing that appears ‘added’ in the Folio. Why would the printed Quarto versions omit or pare down these speeches ? It is more reasonable to say that the Folio version contains added phrases that rhapsodize but do not add any further information.Inthebiographies

‘Richard II’, based on Daniel’s ‘Civil Wars’, four books that appeared in 1595.

Among these are: ‘The “Comedy of Errors’ from ‘Menaechmi’ of Plautus, ‘Mother Bombie’ of John Lyly, ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ from ‘Euphues, or the ‘Anatomy of Wit’, 1578, and ‘Euphues and His England’, by John Lyly (1554 1606) with an affected ornate style called ‘Euphuism’, also from ‘Diana’ by Montemayor from a Spanish novel translated into French.There is also ‘Twelfth Night’ or ‘What You Will’ compared to ‘Comedy of Errors’. John Manningham of Middle Temple, in his diary of Feb. 2, 1602, says, “At our feast we heard a Play called Twelfth Night much like Comedy of Errors or Menaechmi in Plautus.”

Christopher Marlowe wrote the outline or beginning of ‘Macbeth’, very much in common with his ‘Arden of Faversham’ and ‘The Guise’.

Marlowe wrote ‘Edward II’ by referring to Holinshed who relates the history of Henry VI. Marlowe wrote ‘Harey vj’ or ‘Henry VI’.

Since some of the ‘later’ Plays included in the Folio did not have Quarto versions with which to compare, and since many other Plays published in Quarto bearing the name as being the author, by which standard and by which elements of ‘style’ do ‘all the scholars since’ maintain that the Folio Plays differ from all other Plays of the time and in particular those Plays bearing the name but were not ‘chosen’ for the Folio. Knowing which Plays were chosen makes it easier to find elements in them that can be shown not to be in other Plays, but those same elements may also be missing in the Quarto versions of the Folio Plays. No biographies of William give any examples of these elements of ‘style’, merely dismissing the Quartos as ‘bad copies’. Without original manuscripts of the Plays, it is impossible to make any comparisons to the Quartos, and the scholars can always fall back on the ‘Heminge and Condell’ claim that the Folio contains the exact results of what ‘the Author himself’, ‘his mind and hand’ going ‘together and what he thought, he uttered with that easiness’, ‘as he conceived them’.

Regardless of who wrote the Plays that are contained in the First Folio, whether one man or several, if one author rewrote and augmented each Play, in some passages expanding upon them at length as in the Gloster soliloquy, corrected inconsistencies as in the Hamlet Quarto or Folio and amended geographical and historical inaccuracies, the resultant work throughout the Plays then have the hand of one writer with that writer’s identifiable ‘definite style’, his choice of words and the elimination of words and phrases not to the writer’s judgement as proper, many of which substitutions are found in the Hamlet excerpt when comparing the Folio to the Quarto.

‘Richard III’ is from Hall’s ‘The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrious Families of Lancaster and York’. Thomas Nashe’s ‘Terror of the Night’ with the complaint of Buckingham. Sackville’s poem, ‘Mirror of Magistrates’ with Clarence’s last night in the Tower ‘Titus Andronicus’ is very much like the same work of Thomas Kyd, (1557 1595).

‘The Author himself’ wrote Plays that were adapted from stories from the continent, or from available historical records of England’s royals in the Holished Chronicles and he wrote Plays that held titles and contents similar to or identical to those of other playwrights.

‘Thomas Kyd wrote a play called ‘Hamlet’ that is ‘lost’.

The Folio Plays ‘quote’ from Marlowe more than from any other contemporary playwright.

‘Romeo and Juliet’ is based on Arthur Brooke’s versified version of a popular Italian novel, ‘Luigi da Porto’, published 1562 and a novel by William Painter in 1565. ‘As You Like It’ is from ‘Rosalynde’ by Thomas Lodge, 1590.

unification of style in the Plays would appear whether they were rewritten by an original author or by a writer who had not written any of the original Plays that had been printed or produced on stage. This does not settle who originally wrote some, most or all of the Plays, and it matters not as the Folio Plays are not in the same structure as any of the known Quartos or as described by the few extant written reports by those who have witnessed the performed Play Only one mystery can be settled. There is no legitimate evidence that William of Stratford had any contact with the Plays as all of the speculation and legends were invented long after the deaths of William of Stratford and of many of his descendants and long before anyone had ever visited Stratford and no biographer made any inquiry before writing his ‘Life’ and no one made any search of town documents until the middle of the 19th century. That search revealed only mundane information on births, deaths and purchases and as much information was found about most of the other town inhabitants as about William Shaxper. No one in London made any comment upon this man in his lifetime nor did they make any comment upon the Author as a livingWhatperson.are purported to be ‘original manuscripts’ were seemingly taken to the printer for the 1623 publication. The title page for the First Folio reads: “Mr. William SHAKESPEARES [no apostrophe] Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Published according to the True Original Copies”, not ‘original manuscripts’ but ‘copies’; and ‘Original Copies’, the true original copies made by the person who rewrote, amended and augmented all of the chosen Plays.

It is only rarely possible for one author to have written all 36 or more Plays without using any other material already written. All authors were writing in the English language current at the time of writing, and Greene, Marlowe and Nashe and others, particularly those who were near in age and coming from the same two universities under the same Latin and English masters, would have the same background and would be writing in the vernacular of their time for those characters representing the common people, and their literary language would sound more similar in contrast to those of later centuries to whom the language and style were not familiar at least without further and frequent readings. The King James Version of the Bible revealed similar wordings only superficially and that work was translated from Greek and other extant versions by a group of men who were possibly much older and they were not free to elaborate in their poetic translation as they had to come to consensus agreement on the proper words.This

Under this statement is the print of the woodcut that has been examined by a woman in the 20th century by overlaying the woodcut features over a certain portrait of Queen Elizabeth and found that the ‘Droeshout portrait’ in the 1623 Folio proved to be a filled in outline of a man that, by computer comparison, matches perfectly in all dimensions with the outline of the face of Queen Elizabeth. This comparison matches the important points of the face, the position of the eyes, nose and mouth. The ‘artist’, Droeshout, has filled in these outlines with the face of a man with no beard, a very high forehead and hair flowing out on either side and wearing a white collar rounded at the back with points at the front sides. There seems to be no moustache but the upper and lower lips are shaded heavily directly above and below each lip. The name Martin Droeshout is printed directly below the ‘portrait’ and to the left. Below the picture is the word ‘London’ in bold letters, and below, ‘Printed by Isaac Iaggard, and Ed. Blount. 1623”. Isaac Jaggard was the printer but Ed. Blount was not a printer but was the publisher and one of three persons to take the ‘Copies’ to the printing house.

Ben Jonson is the first person to produce a large volume of collected plays, his own, but he is also a person who was closely involved in bringing the Plays into a printed collection, the Folio of 1632, as he included his own tribute to the Plays. Many of those incidents and phrases that he strongly objected to in the Plays as being ‘ludicrous’ are now absent in the Folio version. Jonson must have written both ‘The Dedication’ and ‘To the great Variety of Readers’ tributes to the Author that were first printed in the second or 1632 Folio over the names of ‘John Heminge’ and ‘Henry Condell’ who were not living in 1632 and were not able to give their permission for their names to be used to praise an Author with whose ‘papers’ they were familiar but whose presence neither had ever witnessed.

11 Ed Blount was also the person who had been responsible for the publishing of some of the plays of Christopher Marlowe. Mr Blount had the authority before 1593 to publish the work of Marlowe, along with John Smethwick and William Apsley. Thirty years afterwards, all three men had the authority to publish the ‘Original Copies’ in the First Folio of the Plays, and Blount’s name appeared on the title page after the name of the Printer. There were no original manuscripts as these were the ‘Original Copies’ and directly after the printing of the First Folio, these ‘Original Copies’ disappeared. Neither these nor all the true original manuscripts are not assigned to a university library or to the collection established by actor Ned Alleyne for the effects of Henslowe and the Rose theatre. No biographer approaches these enigmas nor raises the question of why these precious and only papers, for the first time assembled together on this one occasion, should disappear. If, or since, these ‘Original Copies’ are the result of thorough rewritings by one person, the ‘Masterhand’ would appear as the work of one only Author, but the single handwriting could also reveal the identity of that writer, and since that is not the purpose of the publisher, Edward Blount or of the re Writer, these ‘original copy papers’ must ‘disappear’ and thus the mystery is created.

Yet, the Dedication includes the word, SHAKESPEARE, in capitals but the word ‘William’ is absent. So Jonson, too, in his very few mentions anywhere about the Author always referred to ‘Shakespeare’ and never used the word, William’ as would a friend or even an acquaintance Most indicative of all, the name under ‘Your Lordships’ most bounden,’ is the name John Heminge and John always signed himself as ‘John Heminges’ as his near friends would know.

The book titled “The Complete Shakespeare with The Temple Notes and The Like of Shakespeare with The Temple Notes and The Life of Shakespeare’, published by ‘Books, Inc. Boston New York 1939” includes “The Dedication” on ‘page iv’ and directly below this is “(Inserted in the Folio of 1632)” giving assurance that ever ything in the Dedication and in the accompanying ‘To the Great Variety of Readers’ both over the names ‘John Heminge’ and ‘Henry Condell’ were printed in the Second Folio of 1632.

The style of both writings and the content within shows the knowledgeable hand of one who is more familiar than would be two ‘players’ to address the ‘Dedication’ “To the most Noble and Incomparable Pair of Brethren. William Earl of Pembroke, &c. and Lord Chamberlain to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty…” and then to include the plain but dishonest words, “We have but collected them, and done an office to the dead, to procure his orphans, guardians; without ambition either of self profit, or fame; only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend, and fellow alive. Not one of the countless famous people of that time ever had claimed in writing or in rumour that he had met a man called ‘Shakespeare’ or knew the person who wrote the ‘Plays’ so it was necessary for the writer of ‘The Dedication’ to include such a statement as being ‘so worthy a friend’ of the man and for the ‘great variety of readers’ to be so ‘assured’ in the future.

This must signify that Heminges did not write these prefaces and Jonson was not that familiar with John’s name. Ben Jonson also chose the poet Leonard Digges who wrote the verse containing the words, ‘thy Stratford moniment’, that were the first intimation that the Author of the Plays was honoured by a monument somewhere at Stratford but the verse omitted the location but this mistaken identity of the Author being a Stratford resident named ‘William Shaxper’ or ‘Shacksper’ still did not inspire one person to go to Stratford to visit any of the man’s still living near relativesNotone of the Players of the Burbadge Company is known to have visited this man, Shaxper, at any time before or after his death, nor, particularly, did Ben Jonson visit this Stratford resident at any time. Any such ‘merry meeting’ of the two wherein Shaxper ‘caught his death of cold’ is a fantasy penned centuries later.

WHY CHOOSE THE NAME ? Robert J. Meyer

In Scotland, Marlowe is able to continue to write plays since playwriting is his life, his love and his livelihood. It would be impossible for him to be given public credit for any further plays that he would complete or newly write but the playwrights did not seek ‘fame’ but only the chance to continue to write. His plays could be sold on his behalf and the monies delivered to him. Only a very few friends may have known who was the author of these manuscripts. The owner of the Rose theatre, Philip Henslowe, had staged all of the Marlowe plays. Yet, continuing to give Henslowe any new plays could raise suspicion that the new plays were by Marlowe.

Let it be assumed that Christopher Marlowe was not killed at the Inn in April of 1593 but that it was arranged with Walsingham, the director of spies and for whom Marlowe had served while at Cambridge, sending three of his spies to spend a pleasant afternoon visit with Marlowe at the Bull’s Tavern in Deptford, Kent, a few miles west of where Marlowe was staying at the house of Walsingham’s nephew, south of Greenwich. After a leisurely stroll in the gardens after lunch, the four retire to the upstairs room where a ‘struggle’ or ‘brawl’ would later develop, the reason for which, it would be given out, was ‘over paying the bill for the dinner’ although they had walked and talked quietly for three hours after the meal. It would be claimed afterwards that Marlowe had died of a knife wound above the right eye but there were no other witnesses to verify the ‘reason’. Then he would be ‘buried’ in the Deptford churchyard. Having thusly disappeared, no further inquiries were of interest to the public who were then supplied with printed aspersions upon his character as having attended the godless School of Night. Was Marlowe secretly taken to Scotland where he had expressed interest in living ? No one since has attempted to learn who it is that was buried at Deptford if anyone.

Placing the name of any of the living dramatists on these title pages would be risky as their consent would be required and placing the name of a recently deceased author would be obvious to his still living friends who would recognize the falsity. Why would it be necessary to have any name on the plays as they had been witnessed on stage for years and no one had been concerned about who was the author ? Many Quartos were published without an author’s name, including most of those now attributed to ‘Shakespeare’. There seems to have been no explanation why a name appears on five plays and none on the other thirty or more as there was no interest in why the name in some form is on five plays and none on the other thirty or more now included in the Folio. It is not known whose name, if any, was on that original manuscript of ‘Sir John Oldcastle’ as it is no longer remaining to be examined Yet, at the beginning of the Era of Plays, the author’s name was known to be printed on the play for sale. To illustrate the preciseness and the credit given to a playwright, the title page of the first tragedy and of the first play written in blank verse in its entirety was written before the birth of Marlowe and William of Stratford: “The Tragedie of Gorbodvc, whereof three Actes were written by Thomas Nortone and the two laste by Thomas Sackuyle. Sett for the same was shewed before the Qvenes most excellent Maiestie, in her highnes Court of Whitehall, the xviii day of January, Anno Domini, 1561, by the Gentlemen of Thynner Temple in London (Symbol of Gryphon) Imprinted at London in Fletestrete at the Signe of the Faulcon by William Griffith and are to be sold at his Shop in Sainte Dunstones Churchyarde in the West of London, Anno 1565, Septm 22.”

The reason that the name of ‘W.S.’ appeared on forty or more plays long after 1623 is that the name possibly sold with the reputation implied in that First Folio with so many accompanying commendations from others who never knew William of Stratford or the identity of the Author(s) of the Plays. The few plays that appeared in Quarto are not the same as those now known as the First Folio plays.

The Burbadges operated both the Theatre in Shoreditch that they owned and the Curtain that they rented. It may have been decided that the Burbadges would be the better choice for the production of further plays if by Marlowe. Several plays continued to appear without public awareness of the author. Marlowe’s last play was called ‘Harry vj’ or ‘Henry VI’, and there continued to appear other plays on English kings without publicizing the author.

Everything comes from the three plays, ‘The Three Parts of Henry VI’. Who wrote them ? Was it rewritten ? Were all of the plays in the First Folio rewritten before the publication ?

In 1597, three plays were printed and two more in 1598, all but one without an author’s name. The fifth has the name ‘Shakespeare’. Why was that name used ? Who determined whether a printed play would have an author’s name it ? In 1600 a play was published with the title, ‘The first part of the true and honourable History of the Life of Sir John Oldcastle, the good Lord Cobham’, on the title page of which is the name, ‘William Shakespeare’. It is now known not to be ‘written by Shakespeare’ as the ‘author’ is now considered to be a collaboration of the four poet dramatists, Michael Drayton, Anthony Munday, Robert Wilson and Richard Hathway.

Up to the beginning of 1597, eight of the Folio plays were known to be unprinted for the public and when published in 1597 or 1598 they were still not credited with an author. ’Loue’s Labore Lost’ was given an author, but there was also ‘Loue’s Labore Wonne’ that did not enter into the First Folio. Later critics claimed that it was a misnamed edition of ‘All’s Well’, but early seller lists have both as separate plays. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ had three publication editions proving it to be a popular seller without any author credited. In those rare occasions why was the name ‘William Shakespeare’ used and why in various and spellings ? No other author was misspelt.

The bookseller and publisher is ‘T.P.’, Thomas Pavier. The reason given now is that this was a ruse by the bookseller to cash in on the name ‘Shakespeare’ hoping that the book would sell more copies Up to that date only one of the Plays had been printed with that name as dramatist, hardly the record of a best selling author. Subsequent copies were found without any name on the title page indicating what, that the book did not sell many copies with Will’s name on them ?

The excuses of critics that they were ‘pirated’ or ‘dictated from a poor memory’ do not satisfy as those who witnessed the stage plays and read the quartos leave no reports of ‘foul papers’, a term that was coined in a later century, and they leave no bitter complaints that the quarto was not what they witnessed the month before.

The owner, James Burbadge, built the first theatre building in England for dramatic performances and he named it the ‘Theatre’ in 1576, eleven years before the first Marlowe play. Ten years later, Burbadge bought the Blackfriars property for a theatre stage. His son, Richard, built the Globe in 1595 (?) and he, too, bought and produced plays and acted in them.

Did people toss it aside asking who is this ‘Wllm Shakspeere’? Did the legitimate authors complain ? Then why are their names not on the later editions ?

Richard Burbadge was the first actor to create the title roles of ‘Othello’, ‘Hamlet’. ‘Lear’ and ‘Richard III’ and he had leading roles in the plays of Jonson, Webster, Baumont and Fletcher, as the actor manager of his day. After acting heroes in Marlowe’s first plays, Ned Alleyne continued to play lead roles for many years. Alleyne’s first wife was Philip Henslowe’s daughter, his second wife was John Donne’s daughter. There is no mention in print or in a letter of ‘Shakespeare’ being the author of anything throughout Marlowe’s life in London, until after 1598, four years after the printing of ‘Lucrece’ and ‘Adonis’ when Richard Barnfield gives the name credit for authorship in his ‘Encomion of Lady Pecunia’ when assuming that the author was ‘Shakespeare’ because that name appeared on the title pages when he praised them in 1598.

Whoever in 1593 was the first to decide upon a name whether on impulse or by thoughtful choice, would have eliminated several logical names, those fellow playwrights of Christopher Marlow. As by 1597 or 1598, when the first occasion arose to print any of the plays at least three of them had died, Green in 1592, Kyd in1595 and Peele in 1596. Nashe was alive but only until 1601 when ‘Twelfth Night’ was produced at Court and ‘Hamlet’ was written, but not published, ‘Macbeth’ was written in 1605 but not until 1608 was another play printed with the name credited but as ‘M Wullm Shakespeare’. This time the name appeared at the unusual position, at the top of the title page. This was most unusual. The play was ‘King Lear’. The following year, the play, ‘Pericles’, was published with that name in the usual place, at the bottom of the page, and in smaller print. Those were the last and only times that the name appeared on any play until the 1923WasFolio.Richard Barnfield in his ‘Encomion of Lady Pecunia; assuming that the author was ‘W.S.’ as that name was credited on the title pages when praising the poems in 1598 ? Upon what evidence did Francis Meres attribute the plays to ‘W.S.’ also in 1598 when at that time only one play was published credited to that name. Was he, too, assuming that the un credited plays were by that name ? Meres included ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in his list of plays which he attributed to the name yet not one of the three printings of that play had any author’s name on it. No supposition seems to answer all the circumstances. Was the name used on ‘Loue’s Labore Lost’ only as ‘corrected and augmented by’ to test the waters to see if anyone asked who is this ‘augmenter’ ? Then the name is used in a slightly different form on the bottom of a play title page, again possibly to ascertain it there are any inquiries or complaints of which there are none ? The name is placed high on the title page of ‘King Lear’ also possibly to see if there is a reaction and then the name appears on the bottom as before on the next play, ‘Pericles’, with the ‘W.S.’ name. All is well, no one reacts or complains about who is this ‘William Shakespeare’. Since there were no complaints or too inquisitive questions of “who is this writer whom we never see in the city”, why were there so few occasions when the name does appear and why does the name vanish from all of the subsequent plays after ‘Pericles’ in 1609, a play that did not appear in the 1623 Folio but was included in the ‘Complete Plays of W.S.’ in later centuries ?

Biographers are constantly looking into the Plays and finding ‘probable cause’ for certain lines or moods in the dialogues to reflect the events in William of Stratford’s life, as it is the only ‘life’ that they know to compare these thousands of lines. The ‘shock’ of his son Hamnet’s death in 1596 as cause for the mood in ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’ in “the very first words, spoken by the Countess of Rousillon, “In delivering my son from me, I bury a second husband”, have their echo in the Player Queen’s speech in Hamlet: ‘A second time I kill my husband dead, When second husband kisses me in bed’.” Yet, the Players Scene in ‘Hamlet’ is taken directly from a scene written by Christopher Marlowe ten years before, supposedly with little if any revision. In the proven history of 1592, John Shaxper was living on Henley Street in Stratford with his wife who was ten years younger than he ‘in his sixties’ years, along with Gilbert, 26, Joan, 23, Richard 18, and Edmund 12. William was 28 and his wife Anne was 36. The only time a document has been recorded with Anne’s name, aside from the one relating to her marriage, is in the will of Thomas Whittington, a shepherd of Anne’s family, where a bequest to the poor is listed:“I geve and bequeth unto the poore people of Stratford 40s that is in the hand of Anne Shaxpere, wife of Wyllyam Shaxpere, and is due debt unto me, beyng payd to myne Executor by the sayd Wyllyam Shaxpere or his assigns.” (The spelling was as it was spoken)

This will would have been worded and drawn up by Whittington’s lawyer. Although the money would have originally been given over to Anne’s father, as was the custom of servants to bank with their masters, his savings of 2 pounds would be seen by the lawyer to be in the keeping of Anne since her father had died by this time. The lawyer, however, words the will as to make Wyllyam responsible for paying the executor and not Anne. He guards his client with the addition of ‘or his assigns’. Compare this poor shepherd’s will with the will of Wyllyam who, supposedly, has been referred to as a ‘gentler shepherd’ in ‘Colin Clout’, where his nearest friends are given a meagre amount to buy themselves ‘a ring’ to remember him by.

Marlowe and Thomas Nashe wrote ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage’ while they were students at Cambridge. It was ‘played by the Children of Her Majesty’s Chapel’ and was published in 1594. It was mainly a translation from Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ and was another of Marlowe’s translations as those he made from Ovid and Lucan. The action of Act II, Scene I, appears in the first Players Scene in ‘Hamlet’ and is mentioned in ‘The Tempest’. Also in 1592, the combined Admiral and Strange company produced the ‘Tragedy of the Guyes’ by Marlowe, along with his ‘Harey vj’ and a play called ‘Titus’ which could be ‘Titus Andronicus’ that has been assigned to Kyd or with Peele as this was very much their type of dramatic structure. It was also billed as ‘Titus and Ondronicus’. On May 23, 1592, the Rose theatre produced ‘The Taner of Denmarke’. ‘Titus and Ondronicus’ was staged at the Rose at the beginning of 1594 by the Earl of Sussex Men who also staged ‘The Jew of Malta’, both plays being produced less than a year after Marlowe’s ‘disappearance’.

Marlowe wrote a play for the Pembroke’s Players, ‘Edward II’ that contains this speech from Mortimer: “Farewell, fair queen; weep not for Mortimer That scorns the world, and as a traveller Goes to discover countries yet unknown”. Compare to: “But that the dread of something after death the undiscover’d country from whose bourn No traveller returns”, or to: “How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted o’er in states unborn and accents yet unknown”.

What was William doing through those years ? Although his name was never known in London before the fall of 1593, during the years 1591 through 1593 he is now being credited with the writing of no less than six plays, some list eight plays. ‘What a pile of work” exclaims biographer A. L. Rowse in his books.

To write eight plays in two years would have been staggering for an accomplished writer midway or beyond in his career but to sit down at the outset with no writing experience at even writing a letter before and at the age of 27 to write Richard III is incomprehensible as that play alone would place a poet writer high in Theatre history but 1693 is Registry office’s first entry.

In 1592, the plague year, the merged companies of Lord Strange and the Lord Admiral presented in their first year at the Rose theatre Marlowe’s ‘The Jew of Malta’ and ‘Harey vj’. In May of 1592, both ‘Tamburlaine’ plays were included in the repertoire as well as ‘Jeronymo’ by ThomasKydKyd.was the father of the ‘revenge play’. The greatest of all revenge plays is ‘Hamlet’. Kyd wrote a play which is now completely ‘lost’. It was called ‘Hamlet’.

Although they are now seen as not having very much in common except their occupation, Marlowe and Kyd shared a room after the merger of the companies that staged the plays. In this way, their papers and writings were in the same room for a time during 1590 and 1591 It is fully documented that Marlowe was entirely occupied with writing plays during his years in London from 1587 to 1593. It is also documented that the player companies were active throughout the period of the plague in the provinces when not in London.

There is a great difference that is overlooked with those persons who are independent of the clock, who paint, write, compose music when they wish or when the inspiration comes to them or when a promised deadline is near, they can work into the night or arise early. The actor who is part of a reparatory theatre works by the clock. The theatres played a different play every day for six days each week. There may be rehearsals in the morning for the next day’s play, the regular performance in the afternoon at 3 o’clock and for the actors, the acting was either exhilarating or boring but they still worked by the clock as they were working with other people for an audience.

Playwriting is arduous. The author, unlike the painter, cannot do anything that he chooses at all times as he has to make sense in every line of the script, he has to be factual if adapting a story previously written or elaborating on a history and there must be time to be alone. An author is completely alone with notes, papers, and rewritten pages upon pages. When William’s biographers try to add the role of an actor to William, they are stretching probability further beyond the possible.

‘Titus Andronicus’ is usually placed before ‘Richard III’ in estimating when these plays were written and it is considered ‘still school work’ but this is in comparing it to the ‘later plays’ of theItFolio.istrue that some great geniuses in the arts have been prolific. Leonardo de Vinci poured out work in several disciplines, drawings, science, experimentation as well as painting and wrote about his interests but Leonardo lived to be 67 producing to the end, his work spanning his entire and early adulthood. Copernicus lived to be 70, Montverde, 76, Galileo, 78, Goethe, 83, and Stradivarius was making stringed instruments until he died past the age of 90. All of these great artists kept producing because they loved performing what they were creating and they did not decide upon their art when they were 27 and they did not stop when they were 44 as is now claimed for William.

The biographers’ William had none of this, never associating with any of these minds, only with those unremarkable people of Stratford who had their names placed in these biographies as they were found in old records during searches for the elusive Author of the Plays as they were acquainted with William of Stratford. In 1602, William of Stratford made sure of his title to New Place. He had bought the property from William Underhill, who was later murdered by his son Fulke. When Fulke was executed for his deed, there was some question of the house then being rightly the property of the much younger son, Hercules. Later in the year, Hercules came of age and was visited by William’s agent to procure from him a conveyance that covered the house, two barns, two gardens and now an additional two orchards.

Philips bought a house at Mortlake, Condell had a country house at Fulham and Edward Alleyne was owner of the Fortune theatre.

In September, William also bought a cottage in Chapel Lane across from the New Place gardens and although he bought it from Walter Getley, it was still within the estate of the Countess of Warwick and William had to pay an annual rent of two shillings sixpence. At the same time, Richard Burbadge, Heminges, Phillips and Pope were all buying property in London.

The writer is not always alone. Marlowe along with others was a companion of Ralegh, discussing all subjects that they challenged, new concepts, political, moral, the esoteric, the adventurous with other authors and thinkers. They had great camaraderie with Chapman, Hariot, different personalities with interests in new ideas together inspiring each other.

The London William is almost a blank page. However, it is a large page on which his 20th century biographers have illustrated all the accomplishments that they see him experiencing, his seeing the English fleet depart from shore to defeat the Armada, his acceptance and many appearances at the Court of Elizabeth the Queen, enjoying the personal friendship of her Majesty, writing a play within a fortnight at her bidding, being often entertained by the cream of English society in their own homes.

‘William the author’ was very like none of the others. The Stratford William was very much like all of his friends in Stratford, a self made gentleman from a very humble beginning on Henley Street. His ambition was to be as rich as the town’s richest man, own as much land as he, live in the same house as he, and earn his fortune in the same manner as he, Combe, by selling the produce grown on his land and by lending money. He planned his own monument, greater than that of Combe but in the same church. Yet, William of Stratford is not the ‘Great Poet’ for the 1001 reasons that it is an impossibility.

The biggest and finest theatre in London was the Swan in Paris Garden in Southbank, built a quarter mile west of the Globe by Francis Langley in 1595. The ‘Cross keys’ was an inn theatre used by players in the winter. It was situated on Gracious Street that ran from London Bridge and became Bishopsgate north of Threadneedle Street, on the west side between Lombard and Cornhill Streets. The Bell Inn where Quiney wrote his letter to William was in the block south to Eastcheape. The Chamberlain’s Men used the Swan Theatre for the winter season it is said but it was an open theatre as was the Globe. In 1596, the City Council closed the inn theatres in the City. The new Lord Chamberlain was Lord Cobham who opposed the building of the Swan as “another meeting place for theeves, horsetraders, whoremongers, cozeners, conneycatching persones, practizers of treason & such other lyke”. Marlowe and the others, Peele, Nashe, Greene and Kyd, began writing in their teens while at university if only in exercising their poetry in translations and reworking from the Latin authors. Greene is considered to be a highly rated journalist and essayist and wrote in several mediums. Bacon wrote volumes on many subjects. Ralegh wrote poetry, essays on science and a history of the world. Spenser wrote book length poems. Ben Jonson wrote topical plays and masques. Thomas Watson and William Byrd wrote madrigals and all of these men wrote in different mediums and with widely different themes. A few lengthy poems and full length plays taken from the lives of English Royals and re-workings of Latin and Greek and Continental European stories and histories were the exclusive domain of only two, Christopher Marlowe and ‘William Shake speare’ ‘William’ has been credited with writing the plays in the 1623 First Folio, plus the later added ‘Pericles’, and any number of plays between 1623 and 1700 totalling to 70 or more in some lists. In their credited writing, Marlowe and ‘Shakespeare’ were totally alike in that they were totally different than all other writers of the time who included courtiers, soldiers, explorers, and pamphleteers. In personality, they were totally unalike as Marlowe was very much liked by many or all of the others, a free-thinker, outspoken, a close friend of many and an associate of Walter Ralegh, a resident of the local gaol and one who had to duel in the street. He was a Londoner.

The biographers see him engaging in battles of wit with the first Poet Laureate of the Realm, Benjamin Jonson, leading the King’s Men at the funeral of King James I in 1612 long after he had ‘retired’ from ‘leading’ that acting company, ‘the King’s Men’ His biographers’ pages overflow with as many of these triumphs as they can imagine and as the several expert forgers found ‘documented evidence’ of his countless perfections.

Marlowe would then be forced to endure another entire year of his uneventful and fruitless life until he could be charged with atheism, counterfeiting and pinning rude verses upon the wall of the Dutch churchyard in London, May 1593. To be charged further with writing a paper that was confiscated from the possession and abode of his former room-mate on the grounds of heresy and to have them labelled: “Vile, heretical Conceits Denyinge the Deity of Jhesus Christ our Saviour fownd emongst the papers of Thos Kydd prisinor which he affirmeth that he had from Marlowe”. Marlowe would know that he was not betrayed as Kyd was not threatened but tortured to elicit the ‘truth’ and had no chance to claim that the paper was written by neither of them but was a broadside that had been condoned by the authorities as it condemned atheists.

The Privy Council entry for 20 May read: “This day Christofer Marley of London, gent, being sent for by warrant from their Lps, hath entered his appearance accordinglie for his Indemnity herein; and is commanded to give his daily attendance on their Lps, untill he shalbe lycensed to the Contrary.”

How dull for poor Marlowe, one day to be bound over for the sum of 20 pounds, to attend the Michaelmas Assizes, to keep the peace towards Nicholas Helliot under order of the constable of Holywell Street on May 9, 1592.

Can anyone not be envious of a man having as thrilling and as mind shattering experiences as these and to have known such imaginative and illustrious persons of rank ? Compare a life with such moments of delight to the humdrum existence of Christopher Marlowe who had no one with whom to pass the time of day other than the mundane Ralegh, Peele, Spenser, Hariot, Nashe, Kyd, Watson, and all those long forgotten individuals who lived their routine lives of banishment, charges of treason, condemnations for free thinking, accusations of heresy, ending in a dank Tower prison cell, a pauper’s grave, or with his head in basket beneath the executioner’s swing of his heavy axe blade.

Marlowe in his pedantic life finds his former room mate in Bridewell prison, and his best friend, poet Tom Watson, now many months in Newgate before he eventually dies in September past. On the 18th of May, the Privy Council entry read: “Warrant to Henry Maunder one of the messengers of her Majesties Chamber to repaire to the house of Mr Tho: Walsingham in Kent, or to anie other place where he shall understand Christopher Marlow to be remayning, and by virtue hereof to apprehend and bring him to the Court in his Companie. And in case of need to require ayd”

It had been an entire thirty months since he was accosted in Hog Hale by William Bradley in a dared swordfight that ended in the death of Bradley whom he did not have the pleasure of knowing and with the arrest of his best friend, Thomas Watson, charged with the murder of Bradley, along with himself to be afforded the routine of prison life for two weeks in rat infested Newgate in September 1589.

These daily visits to the Privy Council would fill in his vacant and worthless time, it is true. He would be permitted to leave the clear pure air of Kent, where he was a houseguest south of Greenwich at the country estate of his friend, Thomas Walsingham, the nephew of the most powerful man under the Queen. From there he is now required each and every day to travel to London to enjoy its plague ridden air.

“The heroine of Willobie His Avisa is an innkeeper’s wife in the West Country, so beautiful that she draws to the inn a crowd of greedily importunate gallants, so virtuous that, whatever their rank and wealth, she makes haste to drive them all away, even threatening to murder a certain nobleman rather than permit him to besmirch her honour.”

The pseudonymous editor tells that the author of the volume is his “very good friend and chamber fellow M. Henry Willobie, a young man and a scholar of very good hope”. Biographer Peter Quennell says that this scholar is “believed to be Henry Willoughby of West Knoyle, Wiltshire, who in 1591 matriculated from St John’s College, Oxford, at the age of 16 and who was a friend of Sir Thomas Russell, afterwards an overseer of Shaxper’s testament”.

In September of 1594, an interesting work was registered and published with the title, ‘Willobie His Avisa’, that was signed ‘Vigilantius Dormitanus’. This is considered noteworthy because it contains the first literary reference to ‘W. S.’ ‘by name’. The authors are believed to be Roger Wakeman (Vigil-antius) and Edward or Edmund Napper (Dorm-itanus) of Balliol College. The small volume consists of a poetic dialogue of 84 cantos with a prose narrative. The literary merit that has been considered ‘clumsy, sprawling, and a piece of youthful humour’ was very popular at the time having no less than five printings from 1594 to 1609. To have that much popularity, a ‘third rate’ work must have had some topical interest although modern critics feel that its ‘hidden satirical meaning’ defies discovery’.

To compare this topical theme to the story that was told by Sir William Davenant:

1594 Robert J. Meyer

WILLOBIE HIS AVISA

S. “Well met, friend Harry, what’s the cause You look so pale with lented cheeks ? Your wanny face and sharpened nose Show plain your mind something mislikes. Well, say no more; I know thy grief, And face from whence these flames arise, It is not hard to find relief If thou wilt follow good advice. She is no saint, she is no nun: I think in time she may be won.”

The prose commentary tells of her latest victim, an ‘H. W.’. “Being infected suddenly with the contagion of a fantastical fit at the first sight of A., pineth a while in secret grief; at length bewrayeth the secrecy of his disease unto his familiar friend W.S., who not long before had tried the courtesy of the like passion and was now newly recover’d of the like infection. Yet, finding his friend let blood in the same vein, he took pleasure for a time to see him bleed; and instead of stopping the issue, he enlargeth the wound with the sharp razor of a willing conceit, persuading him he thought it a matter very easy to be compassed, and no doubt with pain, diligence, and some cost in time to be obtained. In viewing afar off the course of this moving comedy, he determined to see whether it would sort to a happier end for this new actor than it did for the old player. But at length this comedy was like to have grown to a tragedy, by the weak and feeble estate that H. W. was brought unto. In all which discourse is lively represented the unruly rage of unbridled fancy with the divers and sundry changes of affections and temptations, which Will, set loose from Reason, can devise.”

It is possible that the meaning is not so hidden if it is taken literally. As there was much unnecessary furor over the Dedication to ‘Mr W. H.’ on ‘the Sonnets’ where there was no intention of hidden meanings, codes or messages, so, too, there can be nothing to translate in ‘Willobie’ that the people of that day could not readily appreciate. ‘Vigilantius and Dormitanus’, the authors, wrote in it, “And Shakespeare paints poor Lucrece’ rape” and that is the entire reference to William out of context but possibly the sole interest of these verses to biographers in determining how far back in the 16th century William was recognized for anything.

H. W. is in deep melancholy in his amours dilemma outside the inn of his Avisa when W.S. enters:W.

Willobie: “Willobie His Avisa was written by two young Oxonian scribblers.”

Davenant: “His mother was a very beautiful woman, and of ver y good wit.”

Willobie: “The innkeeper’s wife is in the West Country.”

Willobie: “She is no nun. I think in time she may be won.”

Davenant: “His mother had a very light report, whereby she was called a whore.”

Davenant: “The Davenant inn was in Oxon [Oxford] in the west country.”

Since ‘W.S.’ has been identified in this volume by name and by association with ‘Lucrece’, it may be reasonably assumed that the ‘W. S.’ in the story, is William Shakespeare, but who then is ‘H. W.’ ? Is ‘H. W.’ Henry Willoughby who is said to be 20 years old in 1594, but his birthday may be later in the year and he will be 21 in 1594, or is ‘H. W.’ Henry Wriothesley who was 21 years old on October 6, 1594 ? Is this another strange coincidence to have two names this similar and the ages similar and the text of the Avisa poem so similar to the taunting Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and to the mother of Sir William Davenant who believed that his ‘god father’ was William Shaxper. ‘Willobie His Avisa’ was published in September 1594 when the ‘Sonnets’ were being ‘passed around’. ‘H.W.’, Wriothesley, would still be 20 in September.

Willobie: “The heroine of Willobie His Avisa is an innkeeper’s wife.”

Willobie: “His familiar friend W. S. tried the courtesy of the like passion.”

Willobie: “So virtuous, that she shakes and has to drive them all away.”

Davenant: “He is the son of John and Jane Davenant, host and hostess of the Crown Tavern.”

Davenant: “Jane Davenant, remember that she was elsewhere described as ‘a virtuous wife.’

Davenant: “Master Shakspear did commonly lye at his house in Oxon.”

Willobie: “So beautiful that she draws to the inn a crown of gallants.”

In preparing his will on November 24, 1556, Robert Arden left “to my youngste dowghter Marye all my lande in Willmcote cawlide Asbyes and the crop apone the grounde sowne and tyllide as hitt is, and vjli, xiijs, iiijd of money” with a share in a reversionary interest in his Snitterfield estate. Robert Arden was the father of Anne and father-in-law of John Shacksper.

Ten years later in April 1592, the justices of the Common Pleas Court ordered the sheriff of Warwickshire to execute judgement on John for the same 7 pounds and damages to Burbadge, and John failed to appear in Court. Also in 1592, he was one of nine listed as recusants dated March and September. “It is sayd that these last nine coom not to Churche for feare of process for Dette.”“Wee suspect these nyne pesonns next ensuinge absent themselves for feare of processes, Mr. John Wheeler, John his sonne, Mr John Shackspeare, Mr Nicholas Barnehurste, Tho: James alias Giles, William Baynton, Richard Harington, William Fluellen, George Bardell.”

The events in the Wilmcote dispute are related by the foremost and most prolific biographer of ‘W.S.’ in the later half of the 20th century, A.L. Rowse, in his “Shakespeare the Man” 1973, P35.

“Already in debt to his brother in law Lambert, in 1578 he mortgaged to him, for 40 pounds ready cash, a house and fifty six acres in Wilmcote, part of his wife’s inheritance. John Shakespeare was unable to repay the money; this led to a family quarrel and a lawsuit in which William’s name was joined as his father’s heir. Ten years later the father offered to repay the 40 pounds which was refused because now the property would fetch a higher rent. Notice that this was in 1587 when William was recouping the family fortunes in London.”

THE WILMCOTE ACCOUNT Robert J. Meyer

These are the years up to 1592 when all of the biographers of ‘W.S.” claim that William of Stratford was writing plays, acting in the theatre and making a ‘fortune’. The name, ‘William Shakespeare’, was never seen in print until in a register of a poem in the fall of 1593.

For some reason, still not established, John suffered financial misfortune around 1576-8. In 1578 9 he dispersed with Anne’s estate by selling the land at Snitterfield to her nephew Robert Webbe for 4 pounds. He rented out the 86 acres of Asbies and the Wilmcote estate of 56 acres and the house was mortgaged to her brother in law, Edmund Lambert, for 40 pounds to be repaid at Michaelmas in 1580, but this was not repaid by then and John had already owed money to Lambert. Edmund Lambert died in 1587 and later in September, John made an offer to Edmund’s son, John, of giving over the entire ownership of the Wilmcote estate for another 20 pounds, according to a Bill of Complaint of the following year that named “John Shackspere and Mary his wife, together with William Shackspere his son”. In this complaint of 1588, John claimed that John Lambert had agreed to pay the 20 pounds and had failed to do so and John was bringing action against young Lambert for 30 pounds in damage. Lambert denied making the promise to buy the property outright and he kept the property without paying the additional 20 pounds. At the time of the suit, 1588, William was 24 years old and had been married for almost six years and he had three children.

John and Mary were stating that they had offered her brother in law, Edmund Lambert, the 40 pounds before April of 1587 when Edmund died, but that he refused to accept it until John paid him what he owed previously. Therefore, John had the 40 pounds in 1587 and so was not destitute. Yet, a series of losses for John are in the records of the 1580s. For not appearing to find surety for keeping the peace in 1580, he was charged a fine of 20 pounds, as a pledge for a Nottingham hat maker, 20 pounds. In 1586, he forfeited 10 pounds bail when Michael Pryce, a Stratford tinker, skipped bail in Coventry. John could not repay William Burbadge the seven pounds that arbiters agreed that he should repay in July 1582, from a house lease in Stratford.

Father John brought suit against John Lambert in 1597 and again in 1599 but William had no legal involvement in either suit and was not named in them. A. L. Rowse described this Wilmcote account in his previous book of 1963, ‘William Shakespeare, a Biography” on P35 which is of a different wording than his 1973 book.

“At Michaelmas 1580, John Shakespeare was unable to repay the money, and the property remained in the hands of the Lamberts. This led to a family quarrel and a lawsuit in which William Shakespeare’s name was joined as his father’s heir. John Shakespeare claimed that, in return for another 20 pounds promised, the Lamberts might have full title to the property. The Lamberts denied the claim. Some ten years later John Shakespeare offered to repay the 40 pounds, but then it was refused, since the lease on the property was nearly expired and it would let for a higher rent. Notice that this was in 1597 when William had recouped the family fortunes in London.”Rowse here always refers to ‘the Lamberts’ and never mentions John Lambert who inherited the estate of his father, Edmund, after Edmund died by April 1587. The mortgage was taken out in 1578 to be repaid by 1580 and it was not repaid by that time. Rowse claims in both books that this ‘led to a family quarrel and a lawsuit’. If so, they ‘quarrelled’ for 8 years before John took any action in the lawsuit of 1588.

Father John did not offer ‘to repay the 40 pounds ten years later’ as that offer was made in 1587 to Edmund Lambert who was dead by April of 1587. In 1597, Lambert’s son, John, refused to buy the remainder of the property for 20 pounds, not because ‘the property would fetch a higher rent’ but because John Lambert claimed that he never agreed to pay 20 pounds with no reason given for refusal. In his other 1973 book on ‘W.S.’, A.L. Rowse, directly after relating the incident in which Richard Quiney wrote to William requesting a loan of 30LL in the autumn of 1598, says, P159.

“The consequences of his father’s improvidence has indeed been brought home again at this very time. In 1597, John Shakespeare was able to offer the Lamberts, Mary Arden’s sister and son, the 40 pounds for which he had mortgaged part of his wife’s inheritance at Wilmcote. No doubt the money was William Shakespeare’s. But the Lamberts were not giving up; John Shakespeare had not tendered the money when due, and now the land was worth more. The inheritance was permanently lost to Mary Arden’s son: in 1602 it was sold. So William had to look elsewhere than the old family property: it was in this year that he made his considerable purchases in Old Stratford.”

Rowse says that ‘his father’s improvidence’ at ‘this very time’ ‘of 1598’ but also that his father ‘was able to offer 40 pounds’ ‘in 1597’, so he is improvident with 40 pounds ? The ‘offer of 40 pounds was not made in 1597 to “Mary Arden’s sister’, Edmund Lambert’s wife’, as that offer was made ten years before to Edmund. Rowse also would have his readers believe that ‘the money’, the 40 pounds, ‘no doubt’ ‘was William Shakespeare’s’, but the year was 1587 when William was 24, a ‘pennilesse father’ who had not yet ‘left home to seek his fortune in London’. ‘No doubt’ is a favourite phrase of A. L. Rowse. He now says that the ‘land was worth more’ which is not the reason that ‘Anne’s sister and son’ refused. It was the son who refused and in neither book does Rowse make any mention of John Lambert by name or of his denial of having agreed to buy the property outright for the 20 pounds. If an agreement is made for a certain amount, that amount cannot be raised at a later time because the ‘land is worth more’. The suit that Father John took against John Lambert never involved William in any way but for Rowse, everything pertains to William; it is, ‘no doubt’ ‘his money’, ‘the inheritance is lost’ to him.

‘William had to look elsewhere’, for what, money ?

Since all or most biographers refer to the same information on this account, it is strange that they make conflicting interpretations and incorrect reports. Ivor Brown in his ‘Shakespeare’, 1949, says that William had been “associated with his father and mother in this Bill of Complaint in mortgaging of her old home”. William was not associated on the mortgaging that occurred in 1578 when he was 14 and the birth date of William is well known to all. He may be referring to the suit of 1588 when William was twenty four. All arguments and claims are made to indicate that this William of Stratford was in London in 1587 when the name was never known until 1593 and to support their general claim that William of Stratford was the Author of the Folio Plays. The 1950s to 1990s biographers use the Stratford documents of a man who would never have been known to the 21st century if Leonard Digges had not placed into his poem of the Folio od 1632 the words ‘thy Stratford moniment’.

Rowse still confuses the two occasions as it was Edmund Lambert who in 1587 refused the 40 pounds as he also wanted the earlier unstipulated amount that John owned to Edmund before the mortgage was arranged, and it was John Lambert, whom Rowse never mentions, who refused to pay 20 pounds for outright ownership of the mortgaged Wilmcote property ten years later in 1597. Rowse, in his 1963 book says of the refusal of the 40 pound offer that occurred in 1587: “Notice that this was in 1597 when William had recouped the family fortunes in London”, and “Notice that this was in 1587 when William was recouping the family fortunes in London” in his 1973 book. He ‘corrects’ the date but still says that this offer was made ‘ten years later’ as he had before in 1963 book but which now would refer back to 1577 and the mortgage was not taken out until 1578. In either version, Rowse makes the claim that William was ‘recouping’ the ‘family fortunes’ whether in 1587 or 1597. If this is the Poet of the Folio, supposed also to be an actor, why is Father John in any way wanting for money as is stipulated and recorded in these several documents dated as late as 1592 while being a recusant ‘coom not to Churche for feare of process for Dette’ ?

Leadenhall was a granary and market place ‘especially for corn’ at the east end of Cornhill. William was always interested in buying corn tithes in Stratford and here he would be close to the dealers in corn and other grain commodities. He, also being a moneylender, would be close to the principle exchange for usurers.

Being near to the corner of Threadneedle Street, William would not be far from another trading centre that stood at the corner where Threadneedle, Cornhill, Lombard and Poultry Streets meet at the north end of Walbrook Street about which John Stowe says, “On the east side of this street, at the north corner thereof, is the Stocks market”. This was appointed by Henry Wales, the mayor in 1282, “to be a market place for fish and flesh in the midst of the city”. The Stocks market, then, was a centre where livestock products were bought and sold. However, the Stocks market did not receive its name from livestock for Stowe says that there “stood a pair of stocks for punishment of offenders; this building took name of these stocks”. Today the Bank of England stands at this corner and the Stock Exchange is just east of it on Threadneedle Street.

If this person were William Shaxper he lived just north of Threadneedle Street where Bishopsgate becomes Gracechurch to the south and therefore not far from both the Royal Exchange on Cornhill and the Leaden hall Market on Gracechurch. The Royal Exchange was so named by Elizabeth for the new building for “tendering and making of payment by debtors to their creditors at their appointed days and times, payments were more usually made at the font in Poules church, and now most commonly at the Royal Exchange”, as John Stowe worded it.

Although he did not publish them, John Aubrey recorded some notes taken down to remind him to interview Mr Beeston, the son of the actor who had been in the Burbadge acting company. The notes as recorded on his paper under the name of ‘W. Shakespeare’ were: “he lived in Shore-ditch, (neer-Nort) at Hoglane within 6 dores Norton folgate”. Aubrey, it seems, intended to write ‘neer Norton Folgate’ but crossed out ‘neer Nort’ and wrote in ‘at Hoglane’. Although Shore ditch is now taken to be a neighbourhood area, it was then the name of a portion of the street or road that began at the City’s end and as Bishopsgate became Norton Folgate for a short way and, at the crossroad at Hoglane, it became Shoreditch Street leading north. To say ‘He lived in Shore ditch’ would mean that ‘He lived in Shoreditch Street’ as they also said ‘The Bull Tavern in Bishopsgate’. Aubrey’s notes are then interpreted as “He lived in Shoreditch Street at the intersection of Hoglane within 6 doors of where Shoreditch becomes Norton Folgate”. Hoglane is now called ‘Worship Street’.

In George William’s ‘Guide to Literary London 1973’, another residence is identified. “Walking down Bishopsgate south of Houndsditch one finds to the left, first, ‘St Helen’s’ and then ‘Great St Helen’s’, a short street leading to the church of that name. A certain William Shakespeare lived on this street in 1598.”

John Stowe’s ‘Survay of London’ describes this area: “From Aldgate east again lieth a large street, replenished with buildings; to wit, on the north side the parish church of St Botolph, and so other buildings to Hog Lane.”

“Now again from Aldgate north west to Bishopsgate, lieth Houndsditch, and so to Bishopsgate. North, and by east from Bishopsgate, lieth a large street or highway having on the west side thereof the parish church of St Buttoph.”

“Then is this hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem, founded by a citizen on London, and as before is showed: up to the bars without the which is Norton fall gate, a liberty so called, belonging to the dean of Pauls; thence up to the late dissolved priory of St John Baptist, called Holywell, a house of nuns, old time founded by a bishop of London.”

WILIAM LIVED HERE [?] Robert J. Meyer

George Williams’ modern ‘Guide’ reads, “Bishopsgate changes into Norton Folgate, a very short street, where Christopher Marlowe lived. No vestige remains of his habitation here. At the end of Norton Folgate (as it becomes Shoreditch High Street), Worship Street enters from the left. William Shakespeare is said to have lived here, ‘six doors from Norton Folgate”.

From these directions, William Shaxper and Christopher Marlowe lived in residences that were within a half block from each other on the same side of the same road but Marlowe had ‘disappeared’ before the name of Shakespeare was known but Willy Shaxper could have been in Town. From this account, both actor Richard Burbadge and dramatist John Webster (15801625?) lived in lodging houses nearby on Bishopsgate. These gentlemen of the theatre lived near the lodgings of William Shaxper, and they may easily have passed him by on Bishopsgate on their way to the near by Theatre or have seen him quaffing an October ale at the Bull Tavern on Bishopsgate or witnessed him lending money at the Stocksmarket at the corner of Leadenhall but there is no evidence that anyone, including his close neighbours, Webster and Burbadge, knew the man Shaxper as a dramatist.

“From Holywell in the high street, is a continual building of tenements to Sewers ditch, having one small side of a field, already made a garden plot. Soerditch, so called more that four hundred yeares since, as I can prove by record.”

“The church thereof being pulled down, many houses have been built for the lodgings of noblemen, of strangers born, and other. And neare thereunto are builded two publique houses for the acting and shewe of comedies, tragedies, for recreation. Whereof one is called the Courtein, the other the Theatre; both standing on the south west side towards the field.”

“On the other side of the highway from Bishopsgate and Houndsditch is the Dolphin, a common inn for receipt of travellers; then a house built by Lord John Powlet. Next to that a large house, with gardens of pleasure, builded by Jasper Fisher, from this to the west end of Hog Lane, is a continual building of small cottages, then the hospital called St Mary Spittle. From the which bears towards Soers ditch on that side is all along a continual building of small and base tenements, for the most part lately erected.”

“Some blocks farther along Shoreditch High Street, Bethnal Green Road enters from the right, and Holywell Lane from the left. In the area along the left hand (western) side of Bishopsgate just beyond Holywell Lane there stood lodging houses where lived Richard Burbadge; and also John Webster, dramatist, author of the famous The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. At the next corner beyond Holywell Lane, turn left on New Inn Yard to its juncture with Curtain Road. To your right stood the Theatre, marked by a plaque at nos. 86 88 Curtain Road. Two blocks to your left, down Curtain Road, just beyond the intersection with Hewett Street, on the left hand side of Curtain Road, stood the Curtain.”

The biographers from the middle of the 19th century to the present wrote about a man who lived in the Town of Stratford for most of his life. He knew and dealt with the most influential people in town: Sturley, the Quineys, John Combe and his son, Thomas. William’s father, John, had held every office on the Council for many years. So prominent was his father that if William had done nothing in his life, never married, never worked, he still would have been known in town as ‘John Shaksper’s boy’. In a sense, William never left town. His wife and three children continued to live there, his two daughters marrying and remaining in town. Once he left for London, he constantly returned at least once ‘every year’ or so later biographers claim and he ‘retired’ permanently there in his ‘forties’. All biographers mention details of his ‘life in London’ but these are only upon the supposition that the name ‘Shakespeare’ appearing on a few Quartos in London referred to the William Shaksper of Stratford all from the inclusion of the phrase ‘his Stratford moniment’ in the Folio of 1632, but no proof has ever been found in any document. This William dealt in the occasional buying of property, trading in grains and other commodities, and in the lending of monies at ‘ten in the hundred’ as recorded in the town files at Stratford. He affected the lives of many of the eminent people while in town, selling corn or malt, collecting tithes, suing for what was owed to him. His daughter, Susanna, married Doctor Hall, who had famed people from London as his patients, the other daughter, Judith, marrying into the well known and respected Quiney family. His sister married and lived her full life in Stratford. He had three brothers who lived almost their entire lives in Stratford, but one was a haberdasher in London.William owned the town’s most prominent house that was on Chapel Street in the shadow of the Gild Chapel and the Gild Hall with its Council Chambers and the school. He owned other buildings, a cottage with gardens and orchards adjacent to the intersection of Chapel Street and Chapel Lane. The Henley Street properties, the house and the shop, were owned by the family since 1552. All of William’s other properties had been owned before by the most prosperous men in Stratford’s history, by Hugh Clopton and by John Combe. William had a tomb installed in the Church along with a memorial bust in his ‘likeness’, one that a viewer once described as looking like ‘a prosperous butcher’. All ‘portraits’ and effigies of ‘W.S.’ were collected or found by people who had never known him and had never seen either the Author or the Stratford man.

John Aubrey was the first man to ‘collect’ and write a biography. It consisted of only a few paragraphs and was not published for another two hundred years. In it, he wrote: “His father was a Butcher, & I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father’s Trade, but when he kill’d a calfe, he would doe it in a high style, & make a Speech.”

WILLIAM REMEMBERED ? Robert J. Meyer

No biographer of the 18th century ever searched in London or in Stratford for any records of ‘Shakespeare’ or looked for any remaining relative who may have had information handed down to him as by then it was at least 80 years since the burial of the one whom they now believed to be the Author of the Plays, William Shaxper of Stratford. No one believing the Stratford man was the Author ever went to Stratford to find any records or to interview any of his descendants. If anyone had taken the trip to Stratford looking for grandchildren, they would still be unaware of their family names as Williams’s two daughters had married and their names were totally unknown by anyone in London. Not one person was stirred by the possibility that some of his plays, books or letters were still in someone’s library at a time when the humblest collection of books were treasured and willed to interested persons. Instead, the one biographer, the Poet Laureate, relied on rumour, fables and his own invention about the man, still convinced that he was the Author. This one brief biography of what is later claimed to be England’s foremost dramatist was meagre at best and in every instance completely erroneous.

These are the only outstanding bits of information about the most prominent landowner in Stratford in his time. He is not even associated in print with Clopton or Combe or any of his land holdings. There is no mention in these early biographies of plays, poems, acting or the Theatre. No mention is included that he was the father in law of a very famous physician. His father’s trade is guessed at with no knowledge of father John’s years as head of Town Council.

‘His father’, John, was glove maker and wool merchant, not a ‘butcher’. The phrase, ’kill a calfe’, was the name of an act for travelling players in the late 16th century. Aubrey may be taking that old act literally when he heard this traditional tale. Thomas Plume did record that John was a glove maker but the report was more concerned with, “He was a glover’s son. Sir John Mennis saw once his old Father in his shop, a merry Cheek’d old man, that said, “Will was a good honest Fellow, but he durst have crackt a jeast with him at any time”.

The supreme imagined statement is that of John Ward, the vicar in Stratford in 1661 who intended to visit William’s daughter according to his surviving note to himself. He possibly already assumed an association of William with plays, yet he says only that “He frequented the plays all his younger time, but in his elder days lived at Stratford: and supplied the stage with 2 plays a year, and for that had an allowance so large, that he spent at the rate of 1000 pounds a year, as I have heard”

This John Mennis was born in 1599 and John died in 1601 and so it was not possible for Sir John to have seen ‘merry Cheek’d’ John anywhere, but Mennis was Sir John and his word as a gentleman, therefore, his word would be taken as ‘struth’, the ‘devil cheating’ contraction of ‘God’sJohnTruth’.Aubrey claimed that William Beeston, the son of Christopher Beeston, the actor, had said that ‘W.S.’ was “the more to be admired because he was not a company keeper, lived in Shoreditch, wouldn’t be debauched and, if invited to writ, he was in pain”, and “he understood Latin pretty well, for he had been in his younger days a schoolmaster in the country”.

John Ward, the vicar, had never seen or read one of the Plays. He was a young man, educated at a university but not knowing the Plays or of anything about the Author’s life, his written statements cannot be believed that the writing of ‘two plays a year’ would produce “an allowance so large to permit a spending rate of L1000 a year”. With all of William’s real estate holdings, he may have had a sizeable ‘allowance’ but not for writing plays. His holdings were completely unknown to these people writing small bits of imaginings. In 1661, the plays had been left on the shelf for decades as productions of plays were forbidden until the Restoration and the revival of some of the plays by Sir William Davenant after 1660 when he alone began the ‘looking back’ that initiated more of pure speculation. Today the name ‘Shakespeare’, spelled in that manner, is unique. There is only one ‘Shakespeare’ and that name has an heraldic ring that does not exist in the names of Marlowe or Kyd, but in William’s day the sound of ‘Shake spear’ was almost common.

This is supposed to be from the man who was the son of one of the actors of the Kings’ Men. It is not recorded that Aubrey ever met Christopher Beeston, as these quotations are from Aubrey’s ‘notes’ on scraps of paper. It is dubious that the son of a King’s Men actor would be still living in 1695 or whenever this was penned as claimed. This note written in brief stating that the Author was a ‘schoolmaster’ is restated by most modern biographers, although it was known by 1890 that William of Stratford never went to a university. The schoolmasters at the Stratford free school had all been graduates of Oxford or Cambridge. Henry Sturley became an assistant master at Stratford in 1597 but he had attended Oxford at the age of twenty.

There were dozens of families with that name around Stratford and in Warwickshire, ignoring the various spellings that were only phonetic attempts at recording the sound of the name. At least two and possibly three ‘John Shakespeare’s lived at Stratford at that time, one a corviser or shoemaker.

Near the same time, Richard Davies related (1688-1708) that William was “much given to all unluckinesse in stealing venison & Rabbits particularly from Sr . . . Lucy who had him oft whipt & sometimes Imprisoned & at last made him fly his Native Country to his great Advancement, but His revenge was so great that he is his Justice Clodpate and calls him a great man & yt in allusion to his name bore three lowses rampant for his Arms”. Not even the inventive John Aubrey recorded this tale.

It is difficult to know which is being named in the records of fines, suits and sureties of the peace as the entries are numerous in the late 1500’s and many are named John, Richard and William. There were also Shackspers or Shaxpers, or Shakspers, as was father John’s family and therefore William’s family, as well as Shakeshafts, all of whom were never called ‘Shakespeare’ whatever the variance in the spelling. Why should anyone in Stratford have remembered William after 1660 ? The people remembered all those interesting anecdotes that lodge forever in the mind for who knows why. The ‘neighbours’ remembered that, “There was at that time another Butcher’s Son in this Towne, that was held not at all inferior to him for a natural witt, his acquaintance & coetanean, but dyed young”. Now the well remembered Adrian Tyler, or was it George Cawdrey, however, it was ‘a Butcher’s boy’ as both boys were. If William had done something of outstanding interest, had written a memorable verse, there would surely be vivid remembrances, and as early after his 1616 demise as 1634, Lieutenant Hammond of Norwich wrote to a friend that William “did merrily fann up some witty, and facetious verses” on “an old Gentleman a Batchelor, Master Combe”. Richard Brathwaite said in his ‘Remains after Death’ in 1618: “An Epitaph upon one Iohn Combe of Stratford upon Avon, a notable Usurer, fastened upon a Tombe that he had caused to be built in his life time”, but Nicolas Burgh of Windsor heard that William wrote that ‘Epitaph’ on Combe “Att his request while hee was yet Living”. John Aubrey ‘heard’ it differently, that William wrote it extempore in a Stratford tavern just before Combe was buried. Others had known of a printed version of the epitaph on an unnamed usurer in 1608 and in 1614 before Combe died, and later versions named three other men as the usurer. People never have any doubts when remembering an ode to the richest man in Towne and particularly one to a usurer who lent money above the usual ten in the hundred needs repeating, “Ten in the hundred the Devil allows. But Combe will have twelve, he swears and avows. If anyone asks who lies in this tomb, ‘Oh’, quoth the Devil, ‘Tis my John a Combe’”. As the year 1700 approached, the biographer’s information collector’s gleanings sounded more like legends, vague and misty with fewer details but embellished with what the teller thought the listener would like to hear.

William Castle was born in Stratford about the time that William died but he became the sexton of the Stratford church and he was always ready to tell what he knew of the man beneath the floor to the few seekers for ‘first hand’ information. He would tell them that William “was formerly in this Towne bound apprentice to a butcher; but that he Run from his master to London, and there was Received Into the playhouse as a serviture”, as he told Mr Dowell in 1693. Castle was most interested in telling these tales, yet he never knew even the rudimentary information that Will lived across the street from the Gild Chapel, or that he was born on Henley Street where the houses still stood.

Other repeated accounts of this ‘stealing’ mention only one act of poaching. A portrait of this non event was published in the April 14th 2006 edition of the Times Literary Supplement.

Thomas Betterton, the protégé of Sir William Davenant, also near the turn of the century, gathered the Sherwood shilling shocker that William stole deer in the ‘park’ of Sir Thomas Lucy, and as Betterton reported: “For this he was prosecuted by that Gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill Usage, he made a ballad on him. And tho’ this, probably the Essay of his Poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the Prosecution against him to that degree, that he was oblig’d to leave his business and Family in Warwickshire, for some time, and shelter himself in London.”

The caption beneath identifies the picture by the ‘artist unknown’ with “William Shakespeare being brought before Sir Thomas Lucy for poaching a deer from his park at Cherlecot”. Lucy is portrayed as sitting beside and resting his left arm upon a covered table while pointing with his right hand to a carcass of a deer upon the floor being sniffed by a hound. Lucy is accompanied at the table by three people with a tall hatted person in the background looking out through a leaded window. Coming in through the door on the left is a hooded servant carrying a long spear and bladed staff. Before him stands another hooded servant holding a sword by his left hand while presenting ‘Shakespeare’ who avoids Lucy’s eyes looking at him. This ‘lad’, who looks his 30 years with a small moustache, is dressed in breeches, doublet and hose, apparel not suited to poaching but appearing as expensive as those of the well dressed Sir Lucy, all coming from the artist’s wild imagination Sir Thomas Lucy had no ‘park’ in which to make ‘a frequent practice of Deer stealing’, but that never stopped biographers from repeating what they wanted to read, even as it is pleasing to believe that Justice Clodpate is a reference to Justice Shallow in ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor”. It is not only Simple and Slender, it is also Slye.

One particular ‘remembrance’ is never explained by the biographers. John Aubrey set down the recollection of William Beeston, the son of the actor, Christopher Beeston. He “lived in Shoreditch, wouldn’t be debauched, and, if invited to, writ he was in pain”, which is the manner in which Aubrey set it down on paper. The words are supposed to be Beeston’s, but the punctuation is either by Aubrey or by someone else. No biographer explains what ‘writ’ means. Beeston is reported as giving several unrelated bits of information that are divided once they are in print by commas and dashes. Biographer A.L. Rowse puts the dash after ‘writ’ in one book, omits it in another, but the comma before ‘writ’ is always present. The sentence generally includes the dashes after ‘writ’ by most authors. With the comma before ‘writ’, the sentence makes no sense unless there is an unexplained definition for ‘writ’. However, if that comma has been inserted where it should not have been, the entire sentence takes a startling new meaning that no one points out. It would read: “He lived in Shoreditch , wouldn’t be debauched and, if invited to writ, he was in pain.” Is ‘writ’ write ?

In repeating this tale in book after book, the biographers of ‘W.S.’ never mention that if these prosecutions took place they would be recorded in the files that are filled to o’erflowing with mundane writs, sureties and fines that pertain to William’s father and friends in endless array. This is completely overlooked while much is repeated of the equally fictitious Ballad, that ‘First Essay of his Poetry’ that oddly ‘be lost’. O, what a loss that be. Also lost is the identity of the ‘business’ that William left behind along with his wife and three children who are never mentioned in these reasons for leaving as a mere ‘lad’ for ‘shelter’ in London, his ‘Family’ being his parents and brothers who were living in Stratford which Betterton widens to Warwickshire.

William never left any books or papers in his detailed and specific will. Biographers have left the impression that although some people, even yeomen, did leave and specify books in their wills, many did not so that there is no need to give this omission much emphasis. Books were rare and expensive which explains why many wills have no mention of books as they were not owned, but those who had libraries carefully bequeathed them to others which leaves this ‘author’ without books or papers of any kind. Biographers also leave the impression that the reason so little of William’s life is known is that records were poorly kept ‘in those days’, yet considerable information exists that concerns William’s Stratford business affairs as set down in deeds and other legal documents and in the correspondence of his friends. Those people who would have known most intimately the possessions of William were those with whom he had done business in tithes, rents, commodities and property, those who had lived with him in his house at New Place and those who wrote and managed his will.

These closest friends were lawyers, a clergyman, a physician and the only other man not of those professions and who had attended a university before 1595 was Abraham Sturley. He and Richard Quiney were friends, close neighbours and together had spoken and corresponded with each other regarding investments and offers of investments with William. Quiney and Sturley were described in 1595 as “great Corne byers and byers of wood and such lycke”. In 1598, Quiney told Sturley that William was interested in buying land in Shottery or thereabouts near Stratford. Sturley had gone to Queens College, Cambridge, and had written Quiney a letter entirely in Latin and others partly in Latin advising him to “Read Tully’s Epistles”. Sturley wrote the will of ‘John Marshall, minister’, the curate of Bishopton and Bearley, in which Marshall left “all my bookes which are not more specially bestowed” to be divided among his three sons “accordinge to everie ons fitness to use the same”. In making his careful inventory, Sturley listed the only full library of the time, 170 books, including Greek and Hebrew grammars, books in English, authored by Elyot, More, Gifford and others and a pamphlet, ‘Terra Florida’ that is considered to be the 1563 book, ‘The whole and True Discovery of Terra Florida’ (or ‘The Florishing Lands’) of Jean Ribaut and a book that was re discovered in 1954, ‘The Art of Angling’, 1577. In listing and judiciously placing a value on each of these 170 books, Sturley demonstrated his awareness of the importance of books and the interest people took in preserving and passing them on to those who could benefit from them.

Thomas Greene lived with his wife and family at New Place while William lived there. He was a solicitor in Stratford in 1601 and was ‘called to the bar’ the next year. In 1603, he became the Town Clerk, a post that he held until 1617. While at New Place, his first children were born, Anne in 1604, and William in 1608. He was still there in 1609 before moving to St Mary’s House near the church in 1611. His grandfather, Oliver Greene of Tanworth bequeathed his books to his son, Thomas of Warwick, in his will in 1545. That Thomas Greene, senior, left in 1590, to his son, Thomas, junior, a grey mare and 80 pounds, and to his son, John, also of Stratford, a house in Northampton. Thomas Greene entered Middle Temple in 1595 on a surety from the dramatist John Marston, and his father John Marston, senior.

After buying a lease of tithes from Humphrey Colles of Middle Temple in 1609, Thomas Greene joined William and Richard Lane in a Chancery suit. He also made note of what William had spoken to Thomas’s brother, John Greene, regarding the enclosure issue at Welcome in September of 1615. It is fairly certain that Thomas was the Thomas Greene who wrote a poem to welcome King James to London in 1603. It is called, ‘A Poets Vision and a Princes Glorie’.

There is no known writing of William except the scrawled signatures on his will, on the purchase of the house in London and on the next day’s mortgage papers.

William Combe’s brother, Thomas, the legatee of William, lived at Welcome and was the land holder who had caused strife among those living there by enclosing, by means of ditches and bushes, some of the open land that had been used by the neighbours to graze their animals. When Stratford councillors opposed his designs, he called them ‘doggs & curres’. Thomas Greene who was managing William’s tithes and rents in the adjacent area had heard of ‘his kicking & beating his sheppard at Meon demanding his wages’ and later, he wrote of Thomas ‘fightyng at Bishopton’ with Valentine Tant of Henley Street. It is ironic that William left this Thomas Combe his sword. Throughout the records, letters appear either from Council or from Thomas Greene informing William of the proceedings in the ‘Welcome Enclosure’ issue and notes that Thomas Greene wrote as to how William reacted to this affair. On the 17th November 1614, Greene writes in London, (in the ‘modernized spelling by a biographer): “My cousin Shakespeare coming yeasterday to town, I went to see him how he did. He told me that they assured him they meant to enclose no further than to Gospel Bush, and so up straight, leaving out part of the dingles to the Field, to the gate in Clopton hedge and take in Salisbury’s piece; and that they meane in Aprill to survey the Land & then to gyve satisfaction & not before: & he and Mr Hall say they think ther will be nothing done at all”.

6 Greene also wrote a sonnet to Michael Drayton that was published in the 1603 edition of ‘The Barons’ Wars’. He modernized the English in a translation of ‘The history of the Seven Wise InMaisters’.lettersto others, Thomas Greene has referred to William as ‘my cozen’, yet nothing of William was in his possession, no manuscripts, letters, papers or books, nor was Thomas mentioned in William’s will. His brother, John Greene, married Margaret Lane in 1609, became attorney of the Court of Record in 1611, solicitor for town causes in London in 1612 and in 1617 1618, he acted for William’s daughter, Susanna Hall, as trustee for William’s house in Blackfriars Close in London which William bought one day and mortgaged it the next. John Greene was employed in 1614 1615 as steward at a manor court by Thomas Russell who was the other overseer of William’s will, then was recommended to take over for his brother Thomas as Town Steward and Clerk at Stratford, but the council had already chosen Francis Collins. None of these gentlemen ever left any comment regarding William being a playwright or a poet. In 1603, Thomas Russell had married Mrs Agnes Digges who as widow of mathematician, Thomas Digges, was worth 12,000 pounds. Agnes is a form of ‘Agnus’, ‘Ahn yoose’, the Latin for lamb, and so Agnes was usually pronounced ‘Annz’. ‘Annes Ardenne’ is the spelling in Robert Arden’s will. As Mrs Agnes Digges, she had a house in Philip Lane, Aldermanbury, in London, near to the houses of two actors, Heminges and Condell, as well as near William Shaxper when he lodged at Silver Street above the Mountjoys. Russell married Agnes in Rushock near Droitwich in Worcestershire where he lived until his death in 1633 or 1634. Agnes’s son, Leonard Digges (1588 1635) of Oxford, wrote the poem in praise of ‘W.S.’ that was included in the 1632 Second Folio and that mentioned within it ‘thy Stratford moniment’ which began the belief that ‘W.S.’ had lived at Stratford and was the ‘William Shaxper’ buried there. It was Leonard Digges who had said of John Combe’s son, William (1586 1667): “They say in Stratford that he cannot have less than 20,000 in his purse increased by honest ten and 8 in a hundred”.Theother trusted friend of William was the man who wrote out his will, Francis Collins, who became Town Clerk after Thomas Greene, in April, 1617, but was buried on the following September 27th, one year after William. William left Collins 20 pounds in his will and to each of Collins’ seven children he left 20 pounds.

The closest, most trusted person in William’s life had to be his son in law, Dr John Hall who married Susanna on June 5, 1607 and who moved into New Place by 1615 where he tended to William’s medical needs and prescriptions. The Halls continued to live at New Place and were in attendance at William’s death and they continued to live there until Dr Hall’s death in 1635.

Anyone today looking at a printed ‘signature’ would be puzzled as to what follows “Shak “. Both Quiney and Sturley wrote to and about William in their dealings with him, but neither they nor the Combes nor anyone else has any letter from William nor do they say that they had received written word from him. Was Beeston correct in saying “and if he were asked to writ[e] he was in pain” ? The half dozen signatures that are in the will, the purchase and the mortgage of the Blackfriar’s house, are the identical squiggly lines quite unlike the signatures of others of that time. The signatures appear as if they were formed unsteadily, not like the sweep of the signature of Christopher Marlowe nor the quick penmanship of Philip Henslowe in his daily account of the plays performed at the Rose. The signatures are quite unlike the handwriting of the text in William’s will that does match the handwriting later found in the Town Council’s book, that of Francis Collins, Town Clerk.

When the tenants tried to fill in the ditches and tear out the hedges, Thomas Combe ordered his men to stop them. When the men threw the tenants to the ground, Combe “sat laughing on his horseback and said they were good football players”. Combe called the Council members “knaves and underlings in their colour”. Some William biographers intimate that William’s reaction was that he just could not bear the enclosing while commenting that “as a quiet man he disapproved of the enclosing”. Thomas Greene’s notes are clear as they state that “W. Shakespeare tellyng J. Greene that I was not able to beare [or ‘barre’] the encloseinge of Welcome”. It was not William saying that he could not ‘bear the enclosing’ but William telling John Greene that Thomas Greene could not prevent or ‘bar the enclosing’. However, the biographers never miss a chance to paint their Poet as a ‘quiet man’ who would never ruffle anyone’s feathers, while they ignore his taking anyone to court if they didn’t pay on time their ‘one pound, 2 shillings owing’. On December 23, 1614, the Town Council wrote letters to both Mr Mainwaring and to William. John Greene “also wrytt of myself to my Cosen Shakspear”. (This is pronounced as ‘Shaks per’.) Although Mainwaring gave in, Combe continued to make matters worse. He beat and imprisoned some tenants, depopulated the entire village of Welcome excepting his own house and he told Arthur Cawdrey “that yf he sowed his said wheat land he could eate yt upp with hisThesheepe”.affairextended over an entire year with much correspondence and diary notes by Greene and the Council, if not others, relating to William and about William but never a letter or a note by or from William. As copious as the notes are extant on this account, no one involved has noted that they received anything in writing from William. They report only what he said face to face. Many times these old quotations published by modern biographers are changed to the full ‘Shake speare’ spelling as on the Folios as, possibly, in the other Thomas Greene note, “W. Shakespeare telling J. Greene that I was not able to barre the enclosing”. This is false to tamper with the evidence when the very identity is the question. Later 1800’s spellings of the name omitted the final ‘e’ but biographers always retain the final ‘e’ that betrays their reverting to the Folio spelling when referring to the Stratford William whose will was written by Collins and only at the end of the will is the signature ‘By me William Shakspeare’, the first and second sheets of which are also signed but with the spelling ‘Shakspere’, both pronounced as ‘Shacks’.

It is inconceivable that Dr John Hall, Greene, Collins or Russell, all the most appreciative men of literature of their time who had access to that house, would have done anything else than to collect and protect the most insignificant scrap of paper that had the writing of William upon it. The opportunity and power that these four men held is completely ignored in any 19th, 20th, or 21st century biography of ‘W.S.’. Instead, the incident of Dr Hall’s willing to Thomas Nashe his ‘study of Bookes’ is passed off by ‘foremost Shakespeare biographer’, A. L. Rowse, as “which no doubt included Shakespeare’s”, another of his usual ‘no doubt’s.

Is that it ? Is that all ? To continue would be to write a perfect farce. “Elizabeth Nashe, what did you do with your grandfather’s papers ?” “You did what ?!”

One of his patients was Bishop Thornborough who was a companion of the author Lyly at Oxford, another, the Baronet and M.P., Sir Thomas Puckering. Another patient was cured in London by the famous Dr William Harvey, and one entry shows that Hall prescribed an infusion mixed with syrup of violets for ‘Mr Drayton poet laureate’ ‘an excellent poet labouring of a tertianWilliam’sfever’.

Dr Hall’s father, William Hall of Acton, was also a physician and he left in his will to John “all my books of phisicke” and “unto my man Mathewe Morris all my bookes of Astronomye and Astrologie” so that he could give instruction “yf my sonne John so intende and purpose to laboure studdye and endevor in the sayed Arte” and to Mathewe he gave “all my bookes of Alchimye”. Mathewe Morris was a trustee for Susanna Hall in 1617 1618. In his own will, Dr John Hall left his goods and money to his wife and daughter but his manuscripts and his ‘Study of Bookes’ he left to his son in law, Thomas Nashe, “to dispose of them as you see good. As for my manuscripts, you may burn them or else do with them what you please”. However, Hall had two manuscripts “both intended for the press” that were bought by James Cooke of Warwick, who, after translating parts from Latin, published in 1657 Dr Hall’s ‘Select Observations on English Bodies”. One of these manuscripts is now at the British Museum. In Dr Hall’s papers, his patients and his prescriptions are listed there.

Although it is only a legend or what some call a ‘tradition’, it is a story that a Stratford vicar told decades later that William was visited at New Place by Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson where they merrily drank too much or at least William is supposed to have and he died suddenly of a fever after being ‘in perfect health and memory’ but a month before. There is no evidence of this in Dr Hall’s account of William’s death, but since Ben Jonson figures heavily in the ‘Legend of W.S.’, the question arises, if Jonson visited William at New Place in 1616 and William died a month later, would not Jonson and Drayton have some interest in what happened to the man’s personal papers, and would have not travelled to Stratford for the funeral, particularly when his death was a result of ‘their merry meeting’ and also since more than any other ‘evidence’ of the validity of this Stratford William having written the Plays, it is upon the tribute that Jonson gives to the 1632 Folio that it weighs entirely. It is also Jonson who chose Leonard Digges to write a tribute poem that mentions ‘thy Stratford moniment’.

son in law, Dr Hall, ministered to his physical needs, was a record keeper, has inherited books from his father who had wide and varied interests and who knew poets, and so it is reasonable to assume that Dr Hall would have protected any manuscripts of William as he was living in the same house. So would they all, the Greenes who also lived in the house, the trusted Francis Collins and Thomas Russell who administered his will and listed all of his possessions, all responsible people who knew him and appreciated the value of books and original papers. Could they have seen any play manuscripts in that house and not have mentioned them ?

Elizabeth Nashe would have had the same understanding of the worth of books and manuscripts as her father. Her husband, Thomas Nashe, was entrusted with her father’s (Dr. Hall) papers and books, some of his writings being published later. Elizabeth, when her husband, Thomas, died, married John Bernard in 1649. He was knighted in 1661. There were no papers handed on that were written by William as this now must be seen as impossible Since Dr Hall passed everything on to Thomas Nashe, Sir John Bernard would have been totally aware of all papers as he handled the estate of Elizabeth when she died in 1670 at the time when interest was being revived in some of these Plays as they were staged in London by Sir WilliamWilliam’sDavenant.sister,

Joan, had married William Hart, the hatter, before 1600. They continued to live on Henley Street in the west end house. William Hart was sued for debts by Richard Colins, Robert Cawdrey and Arthur Lang in 1600 and by William Wyatt in 1601. Hart died before William in 1616. Joan died in 1646 and their only surviving child, Thomas Hart, moved into the Henley Street house with his family. He had married Margaret Sansage in 1633 and their son, Thomas, inherited both houses on Henley Street from the will of Elizabeth Hall in 1670. Elizabeth died at their home at Abington, Northamptonshire. The properties then passed to “Shakespeare Hart” in 1694 and remained in the Hart family until his descendants sold the property in 1806. Biographers, all believing that the Stratford William is their ‘Shakespeare’, do not list the first name of ‘Shakespeare Hart’ in any other spelling but the Folio spelling which would never apply to the Stratford family as the Folio spelling was still very rare in London when Hart was born into a family of Shakspers at Stratford All biographers have the deliberate penchant to re spell all true variations of the name to the 11 letter form of the Folio. This misleads readers to conclude that the eleven letter spelling is what would be found to be Hart’s name in Stratford records. Those descendants of William and his sister, Joan, who were living and available to those who could have travelled to Stratford to speak with those directly related to William’ were Judith Quiney, his daughter (d.1662), Thomas Hart, his nephew (d.1661?) and Elizabeth Hall (d. 1670). Renewed awareness of the Plays did not begin until Sir William Davenant began the restoration of theatre plays in 1660 that was almost too late for anyone interested to seek out either Judith Quiney or Thomas Hart but not too late to visit Elizabeth Hall by 1670.

There is more information and more varied information about Dr John Hall and the Greenes all of whom lived at New Place than there is about William that consists mainly about rents, tithes, and the buying and selling of commodities. The rents and the buying and selling were collected or performed mostly by lawyers including Greene.

Anne Shaksper, possibly since she didn’t have legal transactions, is not mentioned in the records with one or two exceptions. Yet a biographer says of this, “The utter silence about Shakespeare’s wife is some indication of her place in the scheme of things, a housewife, and nothing more”. What of the their ‘place in the scheme of things’ for his three brothers, Richard, Edmund and Gilbert, as there is almost nothing in the records about them either ?

Thomas Betterton, Davenant’s young assistant, had enthusiastic interest in the Plays in the 1660’s but put off doing any research for almost another 40 years, too late to interview Thomas Hart Junior in Stratford who took occupation of the Henley Street House in 1670 but his son Shaksper Hart took over the house in 1694 but there seems to be no speaking to him recorded. Neither Betterton nor Aubrey make mention of any of the Harts or Nashes. No one seems to know of them before the mid 1800’s.

William’s father as head of the Town Council always made his mark of two glover’s compasses.

It is not known which occupation Richard had if any, as there are only the baptism and death records of Edmund Gilbert is recorded four times, in 1597 as “Gilbert Shackspere of St. Brides, haberdasher” in London, when he and Richard Johnson, “shoemaker”, also of St Brides, went surety for William Sampson of Stratford on Avon, “Clockmaker”, and in 1609 1610 when Margery Lorde, widow, made a lease of property to her son Richard Smith and the lease was witnessed by Gilbert who signed “Gilbart Shaksper” in a ‘neat Italian hand’. Gilbert also took delivery of the deed to the land in ‘Old Stratford’ or Bishopton on behalf of William on May 1, 1602.The deed was “Sealed and delivered to Gilbert Shakespeare to the use of the within named William Shakespeare in the presence of Anthony Nashe, William Sheldon, Humphrey Maynwaringe, Rychard Mason, John Nashe” or so the biograph y book states, its author having incorrectly changed the spelling of ‘Shaksper’ and all the other ‘ancient’ spellings as the biographers usually do. Yet the names ‘Maynwaringe’ and ‘Rychard’ are left in the old spelling but the family name of both William and Gilbert is spelled as the Folio 11 letter name whereas in the 1597 document the name is left in the original ‘Gilbert Shackspere” and in this deed he signed himself ‘Gilbart Shaksper’, both spellings revealing the ‘Shaxper’ sound. This deed, then, may have been prepared in advance knowing that it would be Gilbart and not William who would be receiving and signing the deed. William could have been out of town, of course, but Gilbart, too, would usually have been in London at his business in 1602. Was it arranged that Gilbart be the one to receive the deed so that William would not be called upon to sign before five witnesses ? No, everyone would know that William was not a writer and this would not be a reason to shirk a signature as there was no shame in not being able to read or write other than ‘leaving his mark’.

“My bonds in thee are all determinate and so my patent back again is swerving, So thy great gift upon misprision growing comes home again.” Such daily used words as ‘determinate’, ‘patent’ and ‘misprision’ need not be elucidated to the one who readily grasps the meaning of these lines but to write those lines from invention, how would one know or find these words ?

Anyone living in 1587, even the ‘true but unidentified Author’ himself, would never gain an English vocabulary of any usable size from auditory source alone. The number of words accumulated by ear in Free School would be limited to explanations by the usher or the master of the Latin words that would come before them each day in the words of Cato Marcius and Aesop’s fables, and those verbal explanations would have to be remembered or written down to recall them at a later time, but the emphasis at that time was upon the colloquial use of Latin, the essential feature of grammar school education, with Cicero’s Offices, Oration and Epistles only when the student reached, if at all, the advanced forms.

The literary English could be gained, as the biographers of William declare from legendary trifles, by lodging at the corner of Monkwell and Silver Streets, strolling along Bread Street or Wood street to the busy thoroughfare of Chepesyde, or lounging about the Red Lion with a brown October ale while chatting with the locals, or by joining the illustrious inhabitants of Southwerk for sparking banter with Mr Barrett, Mr Longorth, and Mr Markis, (did not Dickens invent these characters ?) or engaging in some deep dialogue over a lively game of draughts with Mr Tuppin (Pickwick’s friend, wasn’t he ?) to say nothing of the wrapt attention paid to Wilson the Pyper or the colourful vocabulary of Mother Golden the Baude.

When an English author wrote in 1590, how did he choose the correct word, how did he know the precise word to express exactly the shade of meaning that he intended ? Today he would reach for Roget’s Thesaurus or his well thumbed dictionary. The first comprehensive inventory of the English language was compiled by Nathaniel Bailey in 1721. Before that time dictionaries listed only the ‘hard words’ and phrases ‘because the daily vocabulary of the language was not expected to require elucidation’ and the first of these dictionaries, giving the definition of English words in English and not in Latin, was the ‘Table Alphabetical of Hard Words’ by Robert Cawdrey in 1604. Henry Cockeram compiled the ‘English Dictionary’ published in 1623, the year of the First Folio.

The latest reference that the dramatists of 1587 could have used was the ‘Bibliotheca of Sir Thomas Elyot’ of 1538 but the leading word book for generations before that was the first English dictionary, ‘The Pomptorium Parvulorum’ by Geoffrey the Grammarian of Norfolk, England, printed by Wynkyn de Worde which he did in 1449. It consisted of 10,000 English words that were defined in Latin as were the books of Salesbury and Elyot a century later. The dramatists and poets, then, if unable to think of a ‘worde’, and whether or not they had a Wynkyn de Worde handy, they had to understand Latin when they reached for either that book or their Elyot or Salesbury. All the people in the literate world today have lived their entire lives with at least Radio to instil into their memory banks a large vocabulary of English words used not only in conventional conversation but also in literary contexts. At no other time in history has the common man been so infiltrated with so large an aggregate of words, words, words. The greatest range of meanings, the most accurate contexts, the total output of 400 years of English literature, translations from other tongues, novels and plays heard on television, dramas on stage, and the discourses on every subject from the public platform, all to far outnumber the Glossographia of Thomas Blount in 1656 that graphically elucidated a glossary of ‘hard words together with Divinity terms, Law, Physick, Mathematics and other Arts and Sciences explicated’. In 1587, the English common man could be seeing his first English play on stage, but how did the author of that play compose the lines, when he did not have any of our auditory sources to pour spirits into his ear that he may give valour to the actors’ tongue ?

WORDS, WORDS, WORDS Robert J. Meyer

The only resource in 1590 that could be used to develop a creative literate vocabulary to fix meanings in the mind in their proper context, the only supply of actual quotations to confirm definitions by precedent, was a library of books and a long habit of experiencing the broad panoply of subjects that they covered by reading them and being familiar with their contents.

Perhaps the word, ‘dribbling’, was known on Milk Street as a term of contempt, but it may have taken a long read of a book at the sign of the ‘Rose and Crown neere Holborne Bridge’ (1590) to see that ‘exsufflicate’ also meant ‘contemptible’. Possibly it would be known that ‘to gleek’ was ‘to joke’, and to think that they heard it on Threadneedle Street, but to find that ‘to gleek’ also meant ‘to beguile’ might entail a jaunt down to William Griffith’s book shop around the corner at the Churchyard of Sainte Dunstone’s at the sign of the Faulcon. How could anyone even know the existence of ‘hard words’ in 1590 without reading ‘bookes’ ?

The vernacular thus gleaned may supply the sodden soliloquy of the Porter at the gate in ‘Macbeth’, but what would they provide to furnish the literate tongue of the nobleman at the door. Strangely, the nobleman enters and speaks only words of one syllable whereas the Porter, though spiffed, enunciates as many as six 4 or 5 sylable words that he probably remembered from Aesop’s Fables.

Christopher Marlowe was the ‘most quoted of his contemporary authors’, again showing that the reading of and familiarity with the other writers in 1590 along with the essential source books for the story lines was grist for the mill for the Elizabethan dramatists, poets and pamphleteers. For the writer in any age, reading is not only necessary but it is almost a full-time occupation.