Okay, here’s another thing about the whole idea that anybody but Shakespeare wrote all that stuff: Why would anybody resort to such elaborate ends just hide their authorship? All right, I’ll concede that authors sometimes publish anonymously or using a pseudonym, but actually getting somebody to be the beard is a much rarer act. It happened some during the 1950s here in America during the Communist witch hunts, but then people were being persecuted not really for writing, per se, but because of their political beliefs. And the idea that an Earl would have been persecuted for writing poems and plays–unless they were advocating the removal and disposal of the Queen–is absurd.
How could the act of writing poetry have been considered a capital crime when the Queen herself wrote poems? How would the writing of plays have been a crime when she often had plays presented in court and when she quite enjoyed them? And let’s not even get started on James I, who sponsored Shakespeare’s company of players and retained them in his royal retinue, and whose wife, Queen Anne, was an avid playgoer (although, technically, she had the plays brought to her).
The only people who were really, seriously against the showing of plays at the time were the Puritans, who thought they led to sloth in the lower classes. You see many of the same arguments made against television today, especially by certain fundamentalist preachers, such as Donald Wildmon. Many members of the court wrote poems and plays, including the Queen’s one-time favorite, Walter Raleigh. That any member of the ruling class would have had to go to such lengths is absurd. Especially one who publicly repudiated his Catholicism in 1580 and went as far as to rat out his Catholic friends. So little was he in her doghouse that she, in 1586, awarded him a pension of £1,000 per year, the equivalent of £161,459.28 in 2007. Not bad for a guy who had to go to such lengths to hide his “authorship” of “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day.”
Nonsense. It just doesn’t pass the smell test. Not if you know anything about Elizabethan England.
It is true that there was no stigma attached to an aristocrat writing poetry or plays. It most certainly was not a “crime” and no authorship skeptic that I know of has ever put forward such a notion. As you note, it was in fact a route to the Queen’s favor to be an excellent poet. What was not acceptable was for a nobleman to be seen publishing his own poetry under his own name. This may be difficult for us to understand, but it was viewed as being beneath a nobleman’s dignity, and smacked too much of earning a living.
That there was a group of Elizabethan court poets who published under other names is not mere speculation. It is documented. In 1583, historian George Puttenham wrote of a group of courtly poets and playwrights who had “writ commendably”, but who regarded poetry as being beneath their gravity, and therefore “suffered their works to be published without their own names to it, as if it were a discredit for a gentleman to seem learned.” He then names Edward de Vere as the most accomplished of these disguised nobleman poets.
Michael Dunn
Comment by Michael — May 5, 2008 @ 11:55 am |
Fine. I can accept everything you say. As I stated in the post, things get (and got)published anonymously and under pseudonyms. No argument there. However, in what other case did someone actually go to the trouble of finding a living person to attribute their works to? Why was it necessary to have a beard, particularly for the poetry? You don’t get a living, breathing person to get all the credit. That’s one of the advantages of publishing under a pseudonym (and how many of those were fanciful rather than realistic?) or anonymously. Everybody really knows that you did it, but you get to appear modest.
Can you give me examples of other Elizabethan nobles who used pseudonyms and what those pseudonyms were? Were any of them living people?
Actually, at the time, the whole idea of attributing plays to an author was quite new. It was a by-product of the rise of theater in London in the last quarter of the 16th Century. Theater was becoming show business, and an author’s name was something that helped attract a crowd. Including Shakespeare’s name.
Comment by Len — May 5, 2008 @ 12:20 pm |
Perhaps I’m missing something, but my reading of what I take to be the relevant passage in Puttenham shows nothing of the kind:
“And in her Maiesties time that now is are sprong vp an other crew of Courtly makers Noble men…who haue written excellently well as it would appeare if their doings could be found out and made publicke with the rest, of which number is first that noble Gentleman Edward Earle of Oxford.”
Are you reading this to mean the Puttenham is “outing” a whole brace of noblemen who prefered to remain anonymous? I have trouble making the text mean that. The obvious reading to me is that Oxford is being listed as “the first” of “the rest,” that is, the Noblemen who have published in public. And, continuing down that list of “the rest,” we find such familiar literary names as Walter Raleigh and Philip Sidney. I haven’t made a detailed study of their title-pages, but they were certainly known publicly as poets, which is why they are listed, with Oxford, among “the rest”–the publicly known noble poets.
Every time I take the trouble to run down a piece of Oxfordian “evidence” back to the sources, this is the sort of thing I find.
I would also like to note that the sentence you start by quoting is NOWHERE NEAR the mention of Edward de Vere. It comes pages earlier, in a different chapter. Anyone who wishes can consult the text on-line, at http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=PutPoes.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all
Your “goes on to name” jumps paragraphs, pages and chapters, seamlessly linking de Vere’s name with a sentence that does not, on the face, have anything to do with him. I find that treatment of sources troubling.
Comment by Craig Bryant — May 5, 2008 @ 2:12 pm |
Hello Len,
Where you ask:
“Can you give me examples of other Elizabethan nobles who used pseudonyms and what those pseudonyms were? Were any of them living people?
Actually, at the time, the whole idea of attributing plays to an author was quite new. It was a by-product of the rise of theater in London in the last quarter of the 16th Century. Theater was becoming show business, and an author’s name was something that helped attract a crowd. Including Shakespeare’s name.”
Yes, you are correct: prominently attributing plays to an author was new at that time. And yes, an author’s name now began to attract a crowd. But it is worth noting that the Shakespeare plays were performed and published anonymously until 1598. There is no standard, accepted chronology of when the plays were written, but let’s go with The Riverside Shakespeare’s version of the plays that were supposedly written, performed, and published before that date:
1 Henry VI 1589–92
2 Henry VI 1590–91
3 Henry VI 1590–92
Richard III 1591–93
Venus and Adonis 1592–93
The Comedy of Errors 1592–94
Sonnets 1592–1609
Titus Andronicus 1593–94
The Rape of Lucrece 1593–94
The Taming of the Shrew 1593–94
The Two Gentlemen of Verona 1594
Love’s Labor’s Lost 1594
King John 1594–96
Richard II 1595
Romeo and Juliet 1595
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1595–96
Henry IV, Part 1 1596
The Merchant of Venice 1596–97
Henry IV, Part 2 1596–97
The Merry Wives of Windsor 1597
It is reasonable to assume that these plays were popular, and that the author’s name would have drawn a crowd. Shakespeare was a quite well-known name during much of this period, due to the best-selling “Venus and Adonis” which came out in 1593, and “Lucrece” in 1594. One would assume that such a popular name would eagerly be attached to his plays when performed, and trumpeted in print when published. But they were not.
That would have to wait until 1598, after the death of Lord Burghley – the most powerful man in England, Edward de Vere’s father-in-law, and the commonly acknowledged model for Polonius. Then we have Francis Meres suddenly telling us that the author of V&A is also the author of the plays, and we get a sudden flood of “newly revised,” or “augmented”, authorial versions of plays previously published in lousy quarto versions, a flood that continues unabated until 1604, the year that Edward de Vere died. Thereafter a mere trickle gets out, until suddenly we are gifted with half the canon – never before published or performed – with the First Folio in 1623.
Curiouser and curiouser…
As to beards: authorship disguise was common, pen-names were rife (Martin Mar-prelate, etc.), and yes, a living “Batillus” (a stand-in for Virgil in Rome) was an unusual thing. Robert Green’s “Groatsworth of Wit” is commonly believed by scholars today to actually have been written by Henry Chettle. We know from a spy’s report that the Earl of Derby “busied himself in writing comedies for the common players” (he was De Vere’s son-in-law, and a minor authorship candidate himself). As no plays appeared under his by-line, we can assume either that the plays were really lousy, or that he published under another name. As his power and wealth would have guaranteed publication, the latter seems more likely than the former. (Who’s going to say, “sorry, your Grace, these plays suck, and I won’t publish them”?)
There’s a lot that goes unexamined when we are told simply to accept the party line we all inherited. All the authorship movement is really arguing for is that the issue be taken seriously and studied.
Michael
Comment by Michael — May 5, 2008 @ 3:17 pm |
Thanks, Craig. Please pitch in wherever you see fit. You are far more knowledgeable than I.
Comment by Len — May 5, 2008 @ 3:53 pm |
Michael–
I’ve got six minutes before the day’s end, and I have neither the time nor the strength at the moment to respond point-by-point.
Let me just point out this, Polonius and Burghley cannot be factually tied together. One may speculate that that is the case, but how is it provable? Just saying “widely believed” doesn’t mean anything. Widely believed by whom? Oxfordians? Anti-Stratfordians? Guys named Rico? I would have to check on some sources before I could respond to the bulk of what you write.
And all I asked for was one example from Elizabeth’s reign of somebody using a beard. Not in Rome, not in East St. Louis. In Elizabeth’s England. If you can show that this was not a practice isolated to this one case, you might be able to get somewhere. If the authorship movement wants to be taken seriously, it needs to be not quite so fast-and-loose with the facts and more wedded to the scientific method. Any proposition should be approached skeptically so that you can see how it holds water.
If anything, by holding your feet to the fire, I’m doing you a favor.
Comment by Len — May 5, 2008 @ 4:04 pm |
Henry hager Henry hager
Comment by Henry hager — May 8, 2008 @ 11:26 pm |
[...] of logical traps, one of the most common of which is assuming causality where none can be shown. In the comments to a post called “Beards,” a commenter writes that Shakespeare’s name is not on any quarto published before [...]
Pingback by Logic « Are You Happy Now, Norman Mailer? — May 13, 2008 @ 8:42 am |
Somehow i missed the point. Probably lost in translation
Anyway … nice blog to visit.
cheers, Waugh.
Comment by Waugh — June 19, 2008 @ 4:49 am |
Sir Philip Sidney wrote under a pen name. That’s one from Elizabeth’s reign.
Comment by librarylu — June 14, 2009 @ 6:44 am |
Here’s why that does not help the anti-Stratfordian case: First, it is known that Sir Philip Sidney wrote under a pen name. It wasn’t part of some extraordinary secret that lay hidden until some intrepid genius figured it out hundreds of years later. Second, it was a pen name. He didn’t use some other living person as the beard in some grand conspiracy.
The use of a pen name is one thing. I believe Michael Drayton, who was not a nobleman, also used a pen anme in the course of his career. So did many others both before and after the Elizabethan Age. And what, exactly, does that prove in regards to the notion that anyone other than William Shakespeare, burgher of Stratford, wrote those plays and poems? Nothing.
Comment by Len — June 14, 2009 @ 7:54 am |