In yesterday’s post, a commenter who supports the view that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the actual author of the plays and poems that were actually written by William Shakespeare offered the following as “evidence” of the rightness of his claim: He asserts that the phrase “ever-living” is used to mean that the poet has died and since the sonnets came out in 1609 and Oxford was severely dead and Shakespeare was definitely alive that the person who wrote the dedication must have been sending us a message from beyond.
However, what it really betrays is the anti-Shakespearean inability to reason well and the anti-Shakespearean desire to see damning evidence where there is naught but air. Here’s my point. Although using the term “ever-living” to mean “dead” is arcane now, it was not at the time that the sonnets were published. Had Thomas Thorpe or anyone else used that term in that dedication, eyebrows would have been raised all over London. To those folks, it was an everyday term, and referring to someone who was putatively the poet and who was very much alive and making appearances in town as “ever-living” would have–would have to have–caused a giant scandal. It doesn’t wash, just on its own merits.
Further, since we know that the full term, “our ever-living poet” referred to God, no one at that time would have used such a phrase to refer to any person living or dead because to do so would have been heretical. And I mean this in a purely religious sense. Heretics were not treated at all kindly, and they were typically hanged until they were not quite dead, then cut down and eviscerated with a white-hot knife. Not a fate worth risking in order to give a knowing wink to a fellow co-conspirator.
The problem that these folks have is that they don’t take the time to look at things from the Elizabethan or Jacobean perspective. They ignore all except those few things that they can point at as being clues in a mystery that doesn’t really exist. With the term “ever-living,” they propose evidence that contradicts itself because they don’t put it in context, they make no effort to understand the culture of that society, and they look at everything solely through a modern lens.
Their reasoning always goes from conclusion to fact and not the other way round. Because the obvious and simple does not fit their conclusions, they dismiss it, no matter how much it proceeds from the facts at hand. Shakespeare wrote the plays and poems. Not the Earl of Oxford, not the Queen of England, and not Guy de Maupassant or Morty Gunty.
Thanks to Elizabeth’s network of spies–finks were well-rewarded–we know that Shakespeare’s father got caught buying and selling wool on the black market. If she could find out such a thing about an alderman in the middle of Warwickshire, how could the Earl of Oxford, who was actually a presence in her life, have possibly kept a conspiracy such as the one propounded? The answer’s simple: He couldn’t. The end.
I’m all for arguing from facts. Let’s start with your bald assertion that it is a “fact” that “ever-living poet” refers to God. This is not a fact. It is merely your opinion, having chosen among several possible interpretations of the phrase the one that fits your argument (though it is the one least apt to the context).
Going on to another fact: the sonnets of 1609 were of very limited distribution. Some scholars assume they were quickly suppressed by the government. A bastardized, cleaned-up version published some fifty years later reigned as the official version until someone dug up the earlier, more scandalous original. So eyebrows were definitely not “raised all over London” as the 1609 edition was very limited, and came within a hair’s breadth of being lost to history.
It is interesting to note that the normally hyper-litigious, income-protecting Shakspere of Stratford made not a peep when his very personal sonnets were pirated and published without his consent or participation.
As to the Queen’s being in the dark about the authorship disguise, no authorship skeptic I know of offers such a theory. It is quite likely that she not only approved of it, but demanded it. You mention elsewhere Oxford’s thousand pound annuity. This extravagant sum was roughly equal to what Elizabeth paid for the running of the national post office. It was approved at at time (1586) when the threat of war with Spain was running high, and she was watching the purse strings like a hawk. It was a secretly paid sum, with no strings attached. While it’s putative purpose was to relieve Oxford’s strained finances, she had let other nobles go poor before, and it is hard to believe she would strain the national budget at a time of crisis merely to relieve a spendthrift aristocrat. The sum was to be paid for life, and was renewed by James seventeen years later. And, most notably, it was authorized within days of the most comprehensive reorganization of the press and of censorship during the whole Tudor era.
“Art made tongue-tied by authority” says the sonnet. Elizabeth had her brilliant courtier poet on a thousand pound rope and she used it well. The flood of proto-Shakespearean plays that the Queen’s Men began performing at this time supports the view that Oxford functioned as the unofficial guiding hand behind a state-sponsored propaganda campaign to control public sentiment in the lead up to the battle with the Armada. Elizabethan satirist (and Oxford protoge) Thomas Nashe specifically references this as the “policy of plays” used by the regime to keep idle brains busy with patriotic drama.
The problem with dismissing the authorship issue out of hand as the work of people who can’t think properly is that orthodox defenders often end up ignorant of the damning specifics of the case. This is because they’re taught that only cranks take the issue seriously. That the list of cranks includes three current U.S. Supreme Court Justices, as well as numerous theatrical and literary luminaries seems not to bother them.
Michael
Comment by Michael — May 5, 2008 @ 12:59 pm |
Okay. That so-called “bald assertion” is based on research done in original documents by the 20th Century Canadian Shakespearean scholor Leslie Hotson. I stated this at the time. He found 30–count ‘em, 30!–instances of the exact formulation “our ever-living poet” other than in this dedication and every time it referred to God. 30 out of 30. I like those odds. Since then I have come across the work of Don Foster, also a scholar. He went through (at that time–1983) “every surviving English book, pamphlet, and single-page broadside printed during this historical period” on microfilm. His findings?
When poetry was attacked by Puritans as an idle pursuit, its defenders typically replied that the word poet (from the Latin poeta) means “maker,” and that God is himself a poet. This God-is-our-Poet trope appears in at least three books already known to Shakespeare by 1609 if not to Thorpe, including a book published by Shakespeare’s fellow playwright Thomas Heywood only four months before Shake-speare’s Sonnets.
I quote authorities and do not resort to such formulations as “many people believe” which is designed to imply authority where none is to be had. I think that using the work of two independent researchers who worked in original documents and came–without knowledge of one another–to exactly the same conclusion is pretty damn good. So you can take your “bald assertion” crack and use it as a suppository.
“Some scholars.” Like who? Name some. I have. No, this is just another use of weasel words (and that is a technical term) to cover up a lack of authority. And what historical basis do you have for this “suppression”? We know from the suppression of The Isle of Dogs how it worked. First, public records survived. Do you have any for yours? No. Second, people went to prison. (Ben Jonson was in Marshalsea for several months.) They raided your friend Nashe’s house and confiscated his papers. This is all verifiable from extant records and reports. And yet who was arrested in your alleged suppression? The publisher, Thorpe? No. The printer, Eld? No. How about the bookseller, Apley? No again. The sonnets were merely a failure. It happens in the book business.
There was no suppression. It is just a product of your fevered imagination. Every time you come to anything that contradicts your precious theory, you construct a conspiracy. Try facing the facts instead.
Further, what proof have you that the publication of the sonnets was unauthorized? I’ll tell you: none. You state that Shakespeare was litigious, but again you just show off your ignorance of the society he lived in. By the standards of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, he was hardly litigious at all. If you want litigious, check out Giles Allen, the guy who owned the land that The Theatre was on. That guy was litigious.
In fact, we can assume that the sonnets were not pirated. How can I show this? How about with some facts? If you look at the original publisher of Romeo and Juliet in quarto, John Danter, you find that he was jailed for printing pirated works. That’s how literary pirates were dealt with. They ended up in the poky. Did Thorpe? No. Did Eld? No.
I’ve already refuted the “three Supreme Court Justices” canard, which is just another example of how you like to jerryrig the facts so that they fit your precious conclusion. I give you facts, you give me conspiracies.
And, finally, find one instance in which I have called anyone “cranks.” I haven’t. Like so much else of what you posit, it is without basis in fact.
Comment by Len — May 6, 2008 @ 7:40 am |
Thanks for your views on this. Thought you might enjoy my narrative poem on the topic entitled “The Man Who Wrote Shakespeare“.
Comment by Michael J. Farrand — January 22, 2009 @ 5:32 pm |