The Parish Register of Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon records the baptism of Gulielmus filius Iohannes Shakspere on April 26, 1564. The exact date of his birth is not known, however, his funeral monument, on the wall of the church, reveals that he died in his 53rd year, on April 23, 1616, so he must have already celebrated his 52 birthday by that date. Children were baptized at the first opportunity, so we can infer that the boy was born between the 21st and the 23rd, traditionally Shakespeare’s birthday is assigned to the 23rd of April, so he was born and died the same day, not coincidentally the feast day of St. George, patron saint of England.

In the subsequent centuries, the fame of the writer widely thought to have defined British identity has eclipsed the saint originally honored on his birthday, and the second to last week in April has become a time for announcing new discoveries and hawking biographies about the man and his works. In the last few days we learned that a scholar from the University of London, Lucy Munro, has “discovered” Shakespeare’s “long lost” apartment in London, Nevermind that the documents describing the property and recording the purchase in 1613 have been known for centuries, and the property (the old Gatehouse of the Blackfriars monastery in central London) already identified on older maps. Munro found a 1668 map made after the 1666 Great Fire which shows the footprint of the parcel with the name Shakespeare. News outlets across the globe have reported the shocking new evidence that the structure was exactly where the plaque memorializing it has been affixed to a wall for decades.

There is also a new book (published last month) getting attention. What’s in a name? How historians know Shakespeare was Shakespeare by cultural and social historian Susan Dwyer Amussen. Amussen does offer something of value; she provides a rich exploration of Stratford where little Gulielmus grew up, married, had children, and somehow amassed enough money to buy one of the largest houses. She also usefully summarizes information about the playing companies of London, the theaters where they acted, and the common people who attended their public performances, currently scattered among many specialty volumes. What she does not do is establish “how historians know Shakespeare was Shakespeare.” Curiously, despite the title, she doesn’t really consider the evidence beyond the name which links the author to the man from Stratford. Amussen reduces the arguments about authorship to two questions, would someone else have used the name William Shakespeare as a pseudonym or allonym? (the latter if Shakespeare was an actor for the company that performed the plays) and could the man from Stratford have written the works given the limitations of his birth and education. She contends that there is no reason why another author would choose to publish under another name but makes no effort to examine the question, simply asserting that the name indicates the man from Stratford throughout the book. Most of the book is her attempt to answer the latter question, but in a very specific and limited way, not “is the documentary evidence that survives about the Stratford man consistent with his being a famous actor and writer,” but could he have become that man, if a host of things for which we have no evidence had happened, but simply failed to leave any lasting evidence. Nearly all the evidence she cites on behalf of her claim that Shakespeare could have been Shakespeare is about other authors born in similar circumstances who did leave incontrovertible evidence of their education, connections to patrons and literary endeavors. Marlowe was the son of a cobbler, Kyd of a scribe, Jonson’s actual father was a clergyman, but died before his birth, his stepfather was a bricklayer, a profession Jonson fell back upon when financial hardship forced him to abandon Cambridge after just a few months. While there is little doubt that Shakspere of Stratford could have matched Jonson’s legendary learning had his life followed a similar course, the abundant evidence for other writers is precisely the point for doubters, why does so much survive for others, but nothing for Shakespeare? Why is Shakespeare biography assembled from the things he could, would, or must have done, rather than anything we can document. In the 178 pages of Amussen’s book (omitting appendices), the word would appears 155 times, could 90 times.

Unfortunately the useful part of Amussen’s book is bookended with diatribes about how doubts about authorship are utterly without merit, and “distorts our image of early modern England at large.” In these she makes unfounded assertions, many contradicting current academic consensus, some contradicted by the more careful scholarship in the body of this book itself. This substack is dedicated to exploring that world using the actual evidence that Amussen ignores, or of which she is simply ignorant. While to date I have posted infrequently, preferring to provide exhaustive and thoroughly researched accounts of specific works (specifically the 1623 publication of the First Folio and the 1593 first appearance of the name Shakespeare in Venus and Adonis), I have determined that it is necessary to provide additional context for my specific topical work. So I will be responding to the appearance of Shakespeare in the news, and particularly to arguments for various candidates, in more frequent short essays under the heading: Shakespeare: facts, fiction, fabrication and falsehood.

Pericles, St. George and Sackville

I have however continued to work on specific topics with an eye toward producing publishable articles, and will also over the next few weeks share several posts concerning my most recent project, the origins of Shakespeare’s? Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Pericles is a bit of an anomaly; it is one of only two plays currently accepted as Shakespeare’s work that were not included in the First Folio. It was published in 1609 as “by William Shakespeare” although it has long been believed to be at least partially written by George Wilkins, a brothel owner who published a novelization of the play in the previous year. I have concluded that Pericles was written for a specific occasion, the Garter feast held at Salisbury House on May 6, 1608.

That story begins on today’s date April 19, with the death of Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset, and Lord Treasurer of England. As Sackville was a Garter knight, his death created a vacancy in the Order, strictly limited to 24 members in addition to the King (James) and his heir apparent (Prince Henry). The feast was traditionally held on April 23, St. George’s Day to honor the patron of the order (Note that we are back where I started this post), however James was outside London so the announcement of new knights and feast were delayed until his return. Sackville’s death allowed James to name a second new knight in 1608; he chose 23 year old Philip Herbert, the second son of the Earl of Pembroke who been among the king’s first favorites and that James created Earl of Montgomery in 1605.

Sackville’s office, Lord Treasurer, was bestowed upon Robert Cecil, who was already running the country as Secretary of State. Rather than assigning that office to someone else, James simply voiced his confidence that Cecil was up to both jobs, consolidating the hold on power that Robert had inherited from his father William who ran the country as Lord Burghley for most of Elizabeth’s reign. Robert was Burghley’s second son. His brother Thomas inherited the title, Robert took the power, and was rewarded when James assumed the throne with his own titles, Baron Cecil in 1603, Viscount Cranborne the following year, and Earl of Salisbury in 1605. He was made a knight of the Garter in 1606, and thus was perfectly suited to host the 1608 celebration, which would also mark his advancement to Lord Treasurer. The feast, technically the “ordinary” celebration of the Order of the Garter was hosted in Cecil’s newly completed library at his London mansion, Salisbury House. For the occasion, Cecil planned an “Entertainment” which would have to fulfill a complex creative brief. It would have to reflect the history and principles of the Order, with its motto, Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense, shame on him who thinks ill of it, nominally a reference to founding King Edward III retrieving a garter fallen from a Lady of the court, but more generally an assertion of royal privilege and denunciation of envious gossip. It would honor the Garter knights who passed during the previous year, Sackville and Duke Frederick of Wurttemberg, as well as Edward Dyer who had served as Chancellor of the Order for a decade before his death the previous May. It would also honor the new knights, Scotsman George Home, Earl of Dunbar, and Philip Herbert both favorites of the King. Finally it would reflect Cecil’s desire to portray himself as ideal counselor and servant to the king grounded in classical and modern learning, devoid of personal ambition, utterly loyal to his sovereign.

And because the ceremony had already been delayed, the dinner and entertainment would have to be planned, scripted and prepared in just 17 days.

The identification and interpretation was offered in an article published in the Times Literary Supplement for September 5, 2025. The authors include two experts on Hilliard, Elizabeth Goldring and Emma Rutherford, and Shakespeare authority Jonathan Bate. Goldring published the award winning Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist in 2019, Rutherford founded the Limner Company, a consultancy and dealership that specializes in Hilliard miniatures, and Bate has written several books about Shakespeare and his writing. While I have some trepidation about questioning the conclusion of such authoritative experts, I am afraid they have run astray in their desire to link the miniature to Southampton and Shakespeare, and that a much more likely identification can be deduced from the elements of the painting. Perhaps any disappointment will be allayed by the fact that this identification also involves a celebrated writer, a young man thought by many to be the fair youth of Shakespeare’s sonnets and a story of frustrated love.

The first and most obvious problem for this identification is the date offered for the painting. According to Goldring, “The miniature’s style indicates it was painted in the early 1590s.” Hilliard produced dozens of miniatures and some full sized painting of English court figures starting in the 1570s and continuing well into the reign of King James. He was granted a royal monopoly on the production of miniatures by James in 1617, but was jailed the same year and died only two years later. His early work tends to use blue backgrounds, the red velvet with distinctive folds appears after 1590. Apparently Hilliard had trouble representing drapery in this small format, and the way the folds are painted evolved over time. This version reflects the later style seen in the portraits of King James and his family circa 1609. As best I can tell there is nothing that would indicate that this work is from early in the possible time frame from 1590 to 1619. The clothing provides another reason to doubt the early date. The polychrome embroidered linen jacket the sitter wears is a favorite of textile historians and costumers. It is considered highly specific to the period from 1610 to 1620 whence it is known from many portraits and a surprising number of intact garments. The most famous example is the Margaret Layton jacket in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London where it is displayed with a portrait of Layton wearing the jacket by Marcus Gheeraerts the younger dated 1620.

Another example is the William Larkin portrait of Dorothy Carr (now identified as Elizabeth Cary), in the collection of Kenwood house, dated 1614-18, which has bows matching the Hilliard jacket. All the previously known portraits with jackets in this style are attributed to either Gheeraerts or Larkin, so the Hilliard is an anomaly in any event.

While there are examples of similar jackets dating back to the time of Elizabeth, they differ in cut or decoration. It would require a substantial revision of our understanding of period styles to have this distinctive garment appear 20 years earlier than any of the known examples. Why do these authors proffer such an early date? We have many period portraits of Wriothesley, including another Hilliard miniature, this dated in gold, 1594, and indicating the sitter’s age, 20, correct for Wriothesley. There is an obvious superficial resemblance, the hair is similar, both show a love lock hanging over the left shoulder covering the heart, the eyes are similar, both have an irregularly folded red velvet background. However, this is not the wide heart shaped face of the newly discovered painting, it is longer, more masculine. The smaller fallen lace collar folds over a high collar on the doublet with elaborate buttons are all more appropriate for the early 90s.

Both the evolution of fashion and the changes to Wriothesley are clear in this portrait, by John de Critz dated 1600

This is obviously an older version of Southampton, and his beard and face only get longer in later portraits. If the Hilliard is Wriothesley it must be a much younger man. Again, there are a couple elements that are consistent. Both portraits show the same long slender fingers, and the de Critz portrait also shows him wearing bracelets, an unusual accessory on a man.
Hilliard painted his miniatures on the back (traditionally plain white) side of playing card, their values sometimes visible on the reverse of the finished painting. In this case they believe the card was the three of hearts, although only one heart is visible. I think the choice of 3 rather than ace or two is mostly an attempt of these researchers to conjure a romantic triangle as many see in Shakespeare’s sonnets, though I am not sure how they would distinguish among these possibilities.

“Miniatures were inherently private artworks that were frequently exchanged as love tokens,” said Dr Goldring. “This miniature is pasted onto a playing card, which is customary for the time. The reverse of this playing card was originally a red heart, but most unusually, the heart has been deliberately obliterated and painted over with a black arrow. It could, arguably, be a spade - but I think it more strongly resembles a spear, the symbol that appears in Shakespeare’s coat of arms.”

I am not sure why she thinks it is more likely a “spear, as appears in Shakespeares coat of arms” than a spade, as had the symbol actually replicated the spear head from the arms it would have been indistinguishable from the spade symbol traditionally used on playing cards. The sides which flare away from the shaft make this a broadhead arrow. The difference is significant, the arrow is designed to be impossible to dislodge once embedded in its target, insuring that it disables if not kills. Spears (the Shakespeare heraldry image is not a spear but a lance based on its base, but nevermind that) are primary handheld weapons for their wielders, if they remained stuck in an enemy the user would be disarmed for the remainder of the battle.
The broadhead arrow was also a heraldic symbol with a literary connection - it was the sole mark on the arms of the Sidney family, whose members in period include Philip Sidney, the consummate courtier whose tragic death at Zutphen in 1588 made him a national hero.

Philip’s sister Mary was remembered as the titular dedicatee of his romance, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, and for her role editing and publishing her brother’s writing which also included Astrophil and Stella, his sonnet cycle that lit a fad for sonnets in 1590s England, and his Defense of Poesy, a work of critical theory that influenced English fiction writing for centuries. Mary was a writer in her own right, as reflected in the engraving she had made in 1618 which celebrates her as a writer with laurels and swan quills (these play on the way the name Sidney is cognate with the french word for swan and are echoed in the swan motif in her lace collar). The publisher has added “David’s Psalms” to the edge of her book, honoring her most admired work, a translation of the Psalms she began with her brother and completed after his death. At the top of the image you can see the Sidney Pheon. The pheon is distinguished by jagged or engrailed inside edges on the barbs, but these could be omitted (as A. C. Fox-Davies, in his Complete Guide to Heraldry (1909), comments: “This is not a distinction very stringently adhered to.”).
What if we accept the dating suggested by the jacket (1610-1620) and the mark on the back as a pheon, symbol of the Sidney family? As we can see from the engraving above, Mary Sidney Herbert was too old to be the young woman in the image by the time the jacket was fashionable. She did have a daughter Anne but she died young around 1604-5, and would have been a Herbert not a Sidney. Philip had a daughter Elizabeth who married Roger Manners Earl of Rutland, but she too died early in 1612 at 28 so would just barely reach our window for the jacket. There do not appear to be any portraits of Elizabeth, although one might argue a resemblence to the sculpture on her funeral monument in Bottesford. Mary’s younger brother, Robert, on the other hand, had many children who might be the right age for our portrait. In 1596 the same Marcus Gheereart who painted Margaret Layton painted Robert’s wife and children.

Despite appearances, two of these skirted figures are male, William, age 6, is wearing the sword, and Robert the youngest (just one) is to his mother’s right. The inscription identifying him as Lord Lisle and Barbara as a Countess must have been added after his father was made Earl of Leicester in 1618. William died aged 22 in 1612 and Robert would have gained Viscount Lisle as a courtesy title as the oldest surviving male. Robert’s eldest child was his daughter Mary, second from the right, age 8 or 9 in this painting. By the time the jacket in the miniature was in fashion she would be in her early twenties, unhappily married to Robert Wroth. Wroth died a month before the birth of their son in 1614. When the son died two years later Robert’s estate passed to his brother John leaving Mary deeply in debt. Not long after she began an affair with her cousin William Herbert, a family record indicates she bore him two children, although Herbert never acknowledged their paternity. Mary published a long romance, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, in 1621, which is generally read as a Roman a clef which relates the story of their romance. It was immediately censored and withdrawn, and her sequel was never published in period (the manuscript is at the Newberry Library in Chicago). William is himself of literary interest as he is the most frequently offered alternative to Southampton as the fair youth of the sonnets. Both men were the subject of intense pressure to marry daughters of Edward de Vere during the 1590s, Southampton to Elizabeth and Herbert to Bridget, thought neither match was ultimately accepted (a decade later William’s younger brother Philip Herbert married yet another de Vere sister, Susan). The argument is that Shakespeare was hired to write the procreation sonnets to favor one match or the other, and fell in love himself with the target. The case for Herbert is buttressed by the dedication to “H.W. the onlie known begetter of these ensuing sonnets”, proponents of Wriothesley have to explain why the initials are reversed. William’s case is also strengthened by the evidence that Shakespeare was writing for Mary Sidney Herbert’s company of actors, Pembroke’s Men during the period when the narrative poems were dedicated to Southampton. I tell the story of William Herbert and Mary Wroth and the possible impact of their relationship on the printing of the Shakespeare First Folio here.

As with Southampton, there are details this painting of Mary shares with the newly discovered Hilliard miniature. Mary has the heart shaped face and curly red hair of the sitter, and her gown is adorned with similar red bows. Although this image is still more than a decade before the jacket was popular, it is not hard to see the girl in this image mature into the figure in the Hilliard as she reached adulthood. And of course she would be connected with the pheon on the back as her family symbol. I would not claim the resemblance and the arrowhead are conclusive, but I think the argument for Mary at least respects the evidence in the miniature much better than the case for Wriothesley.

I have argued that the facial geometry of the figure matches Mary better than the somewhat horse-faced Southampton. I asked my daughter, who works as a digital artist, if she could quantify that claim. She produced the following by superimposing a triangle connecting the pupils and tip of nose in the Hilliard on several known images of Southampton and Mary Sidney Wroth. Scaling the images so that the interpupilary distance matches makes the differences in facial geometry obvious: Southampton’s face is much longer overall, while the heart shape of the Hilliard is nearly perfect match for Wroth in these images (the upper image of Mary is cropped from the family portrait above, the lower is a portrait by de Critz at Penshurst). The image below the Hilliard is another painting by de Critz from the Cobbe Collection at Hatchlands, long identified as a woman (‘Lady Norton, daughter of the Bishop of Winton’), but in 2002 identified as Southampton on the basis of similarity to the Hilliard miniature to its left. The resemblance of the new Hilliard in pose to this one was apparently key to its attribution. However seeing them together illustrates the danger of applying the transitive property to things which are only approximately equal.

I am loath to claim this identification is definitive. A serious effort to identify the figure in the newly found Hilliard would require a careful comparison to the originals of these works, more careful examination of the red background against known Hilliard examples and a thorough reexamination of the 2002 case for the Cobbe Southampton by de Critz. I am not sure there is not a better candidate in the extent portraiture of the period. However, I feel quite justified in stating that Mary Sidney Wroth is a much more likely identification than Southampton,

For more information on the jacket in the image:
https://sarahabendall.com/2021/09/01/seventeenth-century-waistcoats-for-women-jacobean-fashions/

https://theclosethistorian.blogspot.com/2014/10/closet-histories-24-embroidered-jackets.html

https://www.sophieploeg.com/blog/strawberries-and-borage-in-17th-century-jackets/

https://www.sophieploeg.com/blog/birds-bees-embroidery/

http://www.larsdatter.com/jackets.htm

The Spring of 1593 was an exhilarating time for readers in London. The theatres were closed by a plague which ravaged the city, but the bookstalls of St. Pauls were filled with new issues from some of the greatest writers England ever produced. Not least of these were the pamphlets of satirist Thomas Nashe who gleefully abused the learned but pedantic Harvey brothers in a literary feud that had begun with Martin Marprelate’s attack on the clergy but had taken on a life of its own.

For his latest response to Nashe, Pierce’s Supererogation, Gabriel Harvey summoned his “Gentlewoman Patronesse” to turn the tables on the writer dubbed the young Aretine after the Italian author famed for his vicious and bawdy writing. In the preface dated April 27 he wrote:

“Were that fair body of the sweetest Venus in Print, as it is redoubtedly armed with the complete harness of the bravest Minerva. - She shall no sooner appear in person, like a new Star in Cassiopeia, but every eye of capacity will see a conspicuous difference between her and other mirrors of Eloquence.

There is little doubt that “She” was Mary Sidney, the beautiful thirty-one-year-old wife of Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, one of the wealthiest men in England. The “harness of the bravest Minerva” invoked the spear-shaking Pallas Athena, associated with Mary in recent dedications by Chistopher Marlowe and Nashe himself (in an unauthorized edition of her brother’s sonnets). The “fair body of the sweetest Venus” refers to the narrative poem Venus and Adonis, registered a week earlier by printer Richard Field but not yet released. When it appeared a few weeks later it caused an immediate sensation. No one had ever written a character quite like the fleshy frustrated goddess who flung herself at the reticent Adonis. It was conventional in Elizabethan poetry that classical Goddesses represent the Queen. For readers who identified the fallen Adonis with Mary’s brother Philip Sidney the identification of this Venus with Elizabeth was both unthinkable and unavoidable. And yet, for all the titillating sexual content, and the political topicality, the poem was also a sophisticated entry into the literary debate over the role of literature inspired by Sidney’s Defense of Poesy. It was the best-selling work of the age. The author was not identified on the title page, but the dedication to the young Earl of Southampton bore a name familiar to us but new to Elizabethan audiences, William Shakespeare.

Centuries of historians have tried and failed to connect Shakespeare and Southampton, as patron, or even as the homosexual lover of the Sonnets. A conflict between Mary Sidney and members of her brother’s circle who joined the faction of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, after Philip’s death may better explain the dedication.

Mary was the patron of Pembroke’s Men, then touring the provinces performing Shakespeare’s first plays. Venus and Adonis reflects her agenda on multiple levels. She wanted to honor her brother, to fulfil his vision of an English vernacular literature that would “delight and inspire,” defying the Puritan impulse to ban poetry and theatre. She harbored grudges against the Queen and Oxford whom she blamed for Sidney’s tragic death and also against those, particularly Greville, Florio and Nashe that would claim his political and literary legacy to their own ends. That nearly all of these appeared to have cooperated in the publication of Philip’s writing against his expressed desire and without her consent represented a galling provocation. Florio’s position as secretary to Southampton provided a pretext for targeting her response.

While the publication of Venus and Adonis immediately established Shakespeare in the London literary scene, it marked a transition for author and patron in another less positive way. When Field registered the work Mary was the most important literary and dramatic patron in England. She sponsored one of the two acting companies that performed at court that season. Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Samuel Daniel and Shakespeare worked together under her direction while she published her own influential translations and edited and published the works of her brother Philip.

Within a year, Kyd and Marlowe were dead, Daniel had moved on, and Shakespeare’s company had become the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Shakespeare’s next works, another narrative poem, the Rape of Lucrece and the play Titus Andronicus, first printed in 1594, both tell the story of a woman violated and silenced. Both characters must die in order to seek justice and restore their honor, a motif known as publishing the corpse.

We are left to speculate- Did the Pembrokes break ties with the theater out of fear after the arrest of Kyd and murder of Marlowe? Was it ordered by the Privy Council (Henry Herbert was as member)? Did Herbert believe his beautiful young wife was having an affair with one or more of her writer friends and wipe out half the writing community of London as a result (there is a potentially lot more history in Shakespeare in Love than people realize). For most of the twentieth century academics tried to separate Shakespeare from the world of court patrons and the literary works they inspired and sponsored. Little by little we are recovering that context as historical research and new perspectives on the works themselves offer windows into the literary and political world of 1590s London.

I tell this story in a series of posts here: Venus and Adonis

Bill Bryson (Shakespeare: The World as a Stage)

The irony of Bryson’s statement is that despite her many connections to Shakespeare, it has historically been Mary Sidney’s perceived unsuitability as a writer that prevented anyone from considering the overwhelming evidence connecting her with the author. The academic perception of Mary Sidney can be divided into three phases, each originating in a particularly shoddy and subsequently discredited bit of scholarship not surprisingly informed with a deep vein of misogyny reflecting ill-founded assumptions about her relationship with purportedly more important male writers, initially her brother Philip and later the author Shakespeare.

As we have seen with Shakespeare, seventeenth century readers did not display much interest in the biographical details of early modern writers. Mary Sidney did not even warrant consideration as a writer. Her most enduring literary contribution, her completion of the Psalm translation started with her brother, circulated only in manuscript. It was not published until 1823 and then only in 250 copies. Her metrical translations of Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine and Petrarch’s Triumph of Death were influential in the developing literary world of Elizabethan England but of limited, mostly historical interest thereafter. Literary interest in Mary Sidney largely ended with her death in 1621 and was not revived until the twentieth century. Characteristically, it was the discovery of a lost earlier edition of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia that made the Countess suddenly relevant to the nascent literary academy. Properly titled The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, Sidney’s sprawling romance started in 1580 as entertainment for his sister while he was exiled from court and she was pregnant with her first child. Philip would bring pages each day to read to Mary and her ladies during her lying in, the period of confinement prescribed noble women as the birth of a child approached. These circulated as a manuscript which has come to be known as the “Old Arcadia.” In the years that followed, Philip decided to correct some errors of composition that rendered the work imperfect in light of the critical theory he developed in his Defense of Poesy, also written during this time. By his death in 1586 he had completed revision of the first two chapters and left notes for the remainder, but the work remained unfinished. In 1589 Philip’s friend Fulke Greville arranged for publication of the partially revised manuscript then in his possession, relying on his Italian secretary John Florio to edit the text and adding introductions to each section which aligned Philip’s work with the Tacitean views of Greville’s new patron, Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex. Essex was the stepson of Philip’s uncle and mentor, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, by virtue of Leicester’s marriage to Lettice Knowles Devereaux dowager Countess of Essex. On Philip’s death Essex inherited his best sword and shortly after married his wife Frances nee Walsingham. After Leicester’s death in 1588 the anti-Spanish, protestant coalition he headed fractured as Essex tried to assume leadership but the earlier generation headed by Mary’s husband Henry Herbert broke ranks. The Earl of Pembroke viewed Essex as rash, impulsive and encouraged by a dangerous sense of entitlement which led him to imprudently antagonize the much more subtle Robert Cecil, heir and successor to the powerful Lord Treasurer. Eventually Pembroke would be proven correct as Essex was manipulated into disgrace and ultimately the rebellion which led to his execution for treason. In the meantime the political division became a literary battle as the two factions contested the political legacy of the apotheosized Philip Sidney.

Mary would not have others lay claim to the work her brother had done as he wrote in the dedication, “onely for you, only to you,” entrusting it to her, “if you keepe it to your selfe, or to such friends, who will weigh errors in the ballance of good will, I hope, for the father’s sake, it will be pardoned, perchaunce made much of, though in it selfe it haue deformities.” In 1593 with the help of her secretary, Hugh Sanford, she produced her own revised edition, clearing away the editorial contributions of Greville and restoring the missing three chapters with material reworked from the Old Arcadia. The prefatory address which disparaged the previous work of Greville and Florio bore Sanford’s initials H.S. igniting a feud with Florio that echoed through the literature of the decade:

Florio responded in his World of Words with a barrage of insults constructed on Sanford’s intials,

Mary’s version of the Arcadia supplanted the earlier printing, something she assured by using the same printer, William Ponsonby. Subsequent editions driven by the popularity of Philip’s writing and his personal celebrity added his other works; his sonnet cycle Astrophil and Stella, his critical theory Defense of Poesy and even miscellaneous poems were included in the 1613 edition that Mary kept for her own library and passed to her niece Mary Sidney Wroth. While Mary was forgotten, her brother became a cornerstone of the English literary canon, with only Chaucer and Spenser of similar importance among the writers that preceded Shakespeare.

19^th century bibliographers seized on the Sanford preface of the revised Arcadia as evidence that Mary had meddled with her brother’s text, inevitably to its detriment. The pervasiveness of this view can be inferred from an 1891 article dismissing the criticism via comparison of the Greville and Sidney texts, “The statements concerning the relationship of the quarto to the first and all other folio editions generally given by bibliographers and literary scholars are erroneous. There do not exist numberless variations between the two texts... Nobody seems ever to have compared the two texts, and the erroneous statement seems to be caused by the words in the preface in the folio edition 'To the Reader.'3” Mary’s reprieve was short lived. In 1907, Bertram Dobell discovered several complete manuscripts of the original “Old” Arcadia which revealed important changes from that text in the last three chapters as they had been known for centuries. A succession of comparisons all concluded, "As will be shown, Mary, so far from faithfully reprinting the original version with only such alterations as the revised books rendered necessary, subjected it to a good deal of bowdlerizing.” The term bowdlerize came from an early 19^th century editor of Shakespeare, Thomas Bowdler, who censored any sexually suggestive material to make the bard appropriate for prudish Victorian sensibilities. This vision of pious, prudish Lady Pembroke was ironically reinforced by the recovery of at least some of her works. The Sidney Psalms which were not printed in any of the editions of Philip’s writing, at last saw a small print run of 250 copies in 1823. It was not known at the time which were written by Mary and which by Phillip but the age of bibliography had finally caught up with Mary, and eventually documents surfaced that revealed Philip had written only 43 at the time of his death. Shockingly for those scholars diligently working to cleanse her influence from the Arcadia, it was also apparent that Mary had completed the rest in a dazzling array of verse forms that somehow managed to be at once more vibrant, more poetic and more faithful to the original Hebrew (did Mary really read Hebrew?) than anything Philip, or indeed anyone else had done previously. In 1877 the editor of the first scholarly volume of Philip’s works lamented that he could not lay claim to Mary’s psalms. “Finally: it has hitherto been thought (e. g. Dr. Macdonald in Antiphon) that it was impossible to determine which Psalms belonged to Sidney and which to the Countess of Pembroke. But the evidence is multiplied that to Sidney belong only the first xliii., e. g. Lord Brooke's Letter given in our Essay (vol. i.) names 'about forty psalms ': Woodford, at end of Ps.xliii., notes from the autograph-corrected Sidney MS. 'Thus far Sir Philip Sidney': British Museum MS. 12,048 writes there, ' Hactenus Sir Philip Sidney '; and so elsewhere. I should gladly have welcomed more as Sir Philip's, for there can be no question that the Countess's portion is infinitely in advance of her brother's in thought, epithet, and melody. Her most remarkable poetry is found in these Psalms.” Groshart (1877) p79. Groshart did not include any of Mary’s psalms in his complete works of Philip Sidney. A complete edition of the Sidney Psalms would not be widely available until 1963.

Mary would not finally be cleared of the charge of expurgating her brother’s work until 1939, by which time decades of suffragettes, flappers and working women had made room for an image of women other than the devout Victorian bluestocking envisioned by 19^th century Sidney scholars. Kenneth Thorpe Rowe summarized the case in three arguments. First, that while the final version of Arcadia did redeem some of the more controversial behaviour of the heroes in the manuscripts, the Old Arcadia was after all written solely to entertain Mary and her friends, by a brother who knew her well and was therefore unlikely to have offended them in any significant way. Second, Rowe’s review of contemporary literature and its critics revealed nothing to suggest the Old Arcadia, which had circulated widely in manuscript, was or would have been in anyway controversial, especially when compared to Sidney’s sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella, full of sonnets pining for a woman married to another man. Finally, Rowe found evidence in the manuscripts that suggested the changes had been planned by Philip as a way to reconcile the narrative with points of his critical theory developed in Defense of Poesy.

Bluestockings and Rough Lads

Unfortunately, Mary had finally escaped the shadow of her brother, only to find the deeper shade of William Shakespeare himself, courtesy of a Yale graduate student, Alexander MacLaren Witherspoon. By the time Witherspoon reached Yale’s august English Department, the whisps of Authorship Controversy that had smoldered since the 1850s were threatening a conflagration that might burn the place down. Mary made a handy fire brake.

Long defined as a “natural” genius in contrast to the learned but labored Jonson, the identification of the author with William Shakspere of Stratford was under attack on the grounds that his humble origin, lack of university education and apparent preference for commercial over literary activities were not consistent with the evident knowledge and passion of the author. The Victorian adulation of Shakespeare was so extreme that George Bernard Shaw coined the term Bardolatry to describe the elevation of Shakespeare and his work to the level of the Holy Bible. In 1840 essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote, “That King Shakespeare, does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs, indestructible.” Where Romantic writers had happily celebrated the unschooled genius whose free flowing-pen effortlessly tapped the wellspring of the human experience, increasingly professional (mostly American) writers saw the craftsmanship and scholarship in the works and doubted writing had come any more easily to Shakespeare than it did to them. First Emerson, then Whitman, Hawthorne and many others expressed growing conviction that Shakspere of Stratford was a fiction, a brand icon that had long ago replaced the real author. They recognized in Shakespeare the same process that the Coca Cola company followed to turn a Turkish Christian martyr into the jolly red-suited Santa Clause. In 1908 Mark Twain wove his own experience as a writer and celebrity into the sparse record of Stratford’s Shakespeare to summarize these views in “Is Shakespeare Dead?”

If Stratford had not produced the writer, another source was needed. The same lack of evidence that ruled out Shakspere as a writer argued for a substitute who had ready access to the political, social and scholarly content that filled the plays, and who had little to gain and much to lose from public exposure. In short it suggested a courtier. An American woman, Delia Bacon, proposed Sir Francis Bacon, whom published volumes had already ensconced as the father of modern science and whose esoteric philosophy was found woven through the works. In Delia Bacon’s view Francis had organized a group of great minds to deliver his ideas to the masses through the medium of the theater, with Walter Raleigh doing most of the writing. Unfortunately, when she traveled to England to find the evidence she was sure would validate her theory, she found neither evidence nor the intellectual support she had had from the likes of Emerson in America. In the end, she was institutionalized at the behest of her family, portrayed as a deluded spinster tilting at windmills. A similar fate eventually claimed the movement she started; the esoteric writing that suggested Bacon as author included instructions for encrypting information in hidden codes that could be deciphered using numerology and codes. The search for a stash of documents shifted to sifting the printed texts for encoded signatures. Some found this unproductive and unconvincing, others found a wealth of unexpected revelations. One woman, Elizabeth Wells Gallup, found a whole new play hidden in type variations so subtle that only she could see them. American millionaire George Fabyan hired a pair of professional cryptologists, William and Elizabeth Friedman, to work with Gallup. The Friedmans, who would go on to found the NSA, subjected the lot to scientific scrutiny and declared it all hogwash.

By then a new contender had arisen. In 1920 J. Thomas Looney compiled a lengthy list of qualifications the author must surely possess and, after considering the candidates among Elizabethan worthies, declared that Shakespeare could be none other than Edward de Vere, 17^th Earl of Oxford. It would be Oxford, the Sidney family nemesis, who would be the primary alternate candidate from then on. Ironically, de Vere’s daughter Susan’s marriage to Philip Herbert after Oxford’s death would provide a critical link from the earl to the production of Shakespeare’s works. Worse, it was an early feminist academic who would somehow turn the emerging authorship controversy against Mary Sidney.

Alice Hanson Luce was a Boston schoolteacher, daughter of a Maine preacher, and graduate of Wellesley. In the 1890s she decided she wanted more from life than teaching in a high school for girls and set out to Europe to gain a PhD in literature. Befitting her feminist ambitions, she determined to produce a scholarly version of the 1595 edition of Mary Sidney’s Antonie, translated from Garnier’s French play Antoine. In 1897 Luce published her dissertation at the University of Heidelberg as The Countess of Pembroke’s Antonie.

Luce explains the attraction of Garnier to Mary is that he follows the precepts of her brother’s Defense of Poesy, “The sister of Sir Philip Sidney could hardly fail to be a lover of plays "full of stately speeches and well sounding Phrases, clyming to the height of Seneca his stile and full of a notable morality," as Philip says of Gorboduc. Unfortunately, Luce misses Philip’s point. He continues that while the play, “dooth most delightfully teach, and so obtaine the verie ende of Poesie. Yet in truth, it is verie defectious in the circumstaunces,” and therefore might not remaine as an exact modell of all Tragidies.” The problem according to Sidney is a failure of verisimilitude. Philip argues for observing the classical unities of action, time and place, not as ends in themselves, but rather that plays should have a coherent plot and consistent characters in a plausible setting in order to achieve something beyond spoof and spectacle. “For proofe whereof, let but moste of the Verses bee put in prose, and then aske the meaning, and it will be founde, that one Verse did but beget an other, without ordering at the first, what should bee at the last, which becomes a confused masse of words, with a tingling sound of ryme, barely accompanied with reasons.”  

Luce’s misreading of Sidney aligned her with the broader intent of the nascent English academy, to isolate Shakespeare and his theater from aristocrats who were being offered as more likely candidates for authorship. She continues to paint with an even broader brush, “Her Antonie is the first of that series of pure Seneca plays which appeared in the last decade of Elizabeth's reign, and which indicates the continuous revolt in higher literary circles against the overwhelming progress of the English romantic drama.”

For confirmation Luce turns to Samuel Daniel’s Cleopatra written in the style of Garnier and dedicated to the Countess as a sequel to Antonie. “Like his patroness, Daniel was a decided opponent of the romantic drama, and in dedicating his play to Lady Pembroke, he complains of the "barbarism" of the public taste, and praises the protest against the ruling dramatic fashion which Sidney had made in his Apologie for Poetrie.”

Here we see the basis of the claim that Mary and her circle were opposing the “romantic theater” and can reveal its absurdity. It is clear that Daniel is referencing a passage in which Philip quotes Joseph Caesar Scaliger, “Qua authoritate barbari quidam atq; hispidi abuti velint ad poetas e rep. Exigendos.” (There are some barbarians who would exile poets from the republic on the authority of Plato). Sidney wrote the Defence of Poesy in response to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse, an attack on the public stage, and its players. Gosson dedicated the polemic to Philip expecting that the Protestant champion would be sympathetic to his cause. Instead, Philip wrote what would remain the most influential work of literary criticism for centuries, elevating Poesy (fiction) writing above all other literary endeavors. In an effort to recast the battle so as to divide Classical court writers like Sidney and Jonson from “popular” romantic writers (eg Shakespeare), Luce had turned the point of Sidney’s spear-like pen from the Puritan censors who would successfully ban theater in 1642 and toward the very works he was defending. Luce apparently was not aware that Mary Sidney Herbert sponsored the company of Richard Burbage which is believed to have first performed the works of Shakespeare as Pembroke’s Men. It is harder to justify her failure to recognize that Jonson was referencing the same metaphor in the folio eulogy, “Looke how the fathers face lives in his issue, even so, the race of Shakespeares minde, and manners brightly shines in his well toned, and true-filed lines: in each of which, he seemes to shake a Lance, as brandish't at the eyes of Ignorance.”

Alexander MacLaren Witherspoon 

In the history of academia there may have never been another successful dissertation as terrible as the work Alexander MacLaren Witherspoon foisted upon the august Yale English department in 1924. The criteria for earning a PhD then, as now, was to establish the value of your contribution, the originality of your thought and the quality of your scholarship. Witherspoon opened his opus “The Influence of Robert Garnier on Elizabethan Drama” by expressing his incredulity that Garnier had ever warranted a reputation as a dramatist.  “Living now, after the wonders of Shakspere's dramas, we find an absurd exaggeration in these expressions of enthusiasm, and posterity has since condemned Garnier to two centuries of obscurity. In the eighteenth century, we read that "peu³ de personnes voudroient se donner la peine de le lire" and the criticism of our own age has censured him as wanting in the first essentials of a dramatist, though recognizing his great importance in the development of the modern drama. But the faults which modern criticism censures, the lack of action, the endless monologues, the long-winded messengers, all these formed his highest praise in the estimation of his contemporaries.”

The problem as Witherspoon saw it was Garnier’s adherence to classical precepts for drama gleaned from Aristotle and his Victorian prissiness which he contrasted with the masculine vigor of Shakespeare. “Garnier's tragedies will be found to tally with these instructions in every point. His eschewing of anything vulgar is one of his most characteristic traits. It is this custom, indeed, which accounts largely for the lack of vigor in his dramas. They are wanting in that element of 'roughage' which is as necessary for the well-being of a dramatic organism as for any other”.

The critical point was that enthusiasm for Garnier distinguished court writers from the main strain of English drama, which was written for the public stage. “The study of (Garnier’s) influence is valuable so far as English literature is concerned chiefly because it shows us what English drama might become had it not been for the influence of that profanum vulgus which Sidney so hated and from which his sister and her friends kept themselves so carefully aloof. In France where the playwrights belonged chiefly to the and court circles the stage for three centuries was limited and conditioned by the rules of classical drama. In England the great dramatists sprang from the common people and like the fabled Antæus drew their strength from their common mother, the Earth,”

Witherspoon summarizes his thesis with astonishing misogyny.

The specific characteristics of Garnier’s writing which Witherspoon finds most objectionable will puzzle modern readers because they are precisely those elements for which Shakespeare is most famous, the coining of new words and the use of soliloquies to reveal the thoughts of characters.

Shakespeare is recognized for the tremendous number of unique words and for having contributed more new words to the English language than any other writer.

Among the usages Witherspoon singles out are “literal translations of phrases from various Latin poets. The nuit brunette of Garnier corresponds to the nigra tenebræ of Statius,” Thank God ‘the dark of night’ never entered English usage.  One more has potential implications for the Horacian anagrams identified by William Bellamy, “the French poet's cordage de l'amour is the vincula amoris of Ovid,” both of these translate as cords or knots of love, in latin nodus amoris, precisely the terms Jonson used for his anagrams.

If Garnier’s coining of new words seems an odd point of contrast with Shakespeare, Witherspoon’s argument that Shakespeare found no use for soliloquy is positively incomprehensible. “An English audience, or English readers, might therefore tolerate some of the externals of French drama, whether tragedy or comedy, but they could not away with the interminable soliloquies and monologues of the French school, however well-worded they might be, or however elegant the descriptive passages, or however elegiac and graceful the moralizing. Instead of words the English demanded action— action that should begin with the first scene, and continue with little abatement until the last act was concluded. The attenuation of any sentiment, however noble, into a long monologue, however elegant, they could not endure. The announcement of a death, which in French tragedy would have called forth pages of rhetorical declamation, evokes in an English tragedy the brief response, ' She should have died hereafter.'” Readers of Shakespeare might recall that response being somewhat less brief than Witherspoon would have it. The author, apparently indifferent to the demands of an English audience, lets Macbeth continue:

Ironically, the famous soliloquy Witherspoon chose to demonstrate Shakespeare’s distaste for soliloquy provides the verse for the statue of Shakespeare erected at Wilton in 1747 to “honour Mary Sidney”(according to a Wilton tour guide as reported by Elizabeth Winkler in Shakespeare was a Woman and other Heresies.)

Lorde, our fathers true relation often made, hath made us knowe

Mary Sidney PSALM 44 DEUS, AURIBUS

To err is human; to really foul things up requires a computer.

probably Bill Vaughan, often misattributed to Paul Ehrlich

In the 1990s a group of students at Claremont College used stylometric analysis to identify the author. When ten established metrics like feminine endings and open lines failed to distinguish Shakespeare, they constructed new measures based on the frequency of certain words chosen to best separate Shakespeare from other writers. By this measure, the most different were the devotional poems of John Donne and Mary Sidney.

Their advisors, Ward Elliot and Robert Vallenza, reported they had eliminated all alternate authorship candidates. “The most distant blocks are those of the Earl of Oxford, the most popular claimant today, and Mary Sidney Herbert, who also has a significant following.”

They explained their work: “No doubt some plays, by virtue of their subject matter would have, say, more lords and ladies than others frustrating the use of the ratio between lord or lady and all other words as an identifier. but it is hard to imagine subject-matter variation changing the ratio of lord to lords or of lady to ladies.”

The text sample for Mary Sidney was from her translation of the Psalms, beginning with Psalm 44: “Lorde, our fathers true relation often made, hath made us knowe…”

Vallenza and Elliot summarize their findings, “Shakespeare’s known writing is consistent enough, and different enough from that of his contemporaries, to distinguish him from everyone else we tested. If Shakespeare’s works were written by a committee, as some anti-Stratfordians claim, the committee was astonishingly regular and predictable in its range of stylistic habits. If they were written by any of the claimants we tested, or by the same person who wrote any of the apocryphal plays and poems we tested, that person was astonishingly irregular and unpredictable.” Unfortunately by choosing their test words to include the known works of Shakespeare and exclude other authors, they had ensured exactly this result.

In 2014 a new team of researchers also used word frequencies to reveal the relationships between Early Modern English Plays and Poems and their writers. Unlike Elliot and Vallenza, Arefin et al used the entire corpus of words, not just 52 cherry-picked to identify Shakespeare.

Their unsupervised method did an excellent job of putting together the works known to be from the same author and identifying potential collaborations. In 2018 their analysis provided the basis of Oxford Shakespeare’s wholesale re-evaluation of Shakespeare attribution. It also identified the Donne’s poems and Mary Sidney’s Psalms as the works most closely related to Shakespeare’s Sonnets and narrative poems, placing Shakespeare at the center of the Sidney circle, surrounded by Philip’s sonnets, Samuel Daniel’s Delia, George Herbert’s Temple, and the works of Sidney secretary John Davies.

In his 1619 conversations with William Drummond Jonson told the story of an assignment he received from the Countess of Pembroke. Drummond records it, “Pembrok and his Lady discoursing, the Earl said, The woemen were mens shadowes, and she maintained them. Both appealing to Johnson, he affirmed it true; for which my Lady gave a pennance to prove it in verse, hence his epigrame.”

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Bill Bryson (Shakespeare: The World as a Stage)

Of all the ridiculous things written about the authorship of the plays of William Shakespeare over the 400 years since the publication of the First Folio, Bryson’s is likely the silliest. The evidence linking William Shakspere of Stratford with the author and the company that performed the plays is distressingly thin. Only a 1613 lease on an apartment in Blackfriars witnessed by one of the players and an interlined bequest of a few shillings for memorial rings connect Stratford to the theater.

In contrast Mary Sidney has well documented connections to the author from the formation of the acting company and first publications of plays and poems until the publication of the First Folio after both had died.

One way to evaluate connections to Shakespeare is to establish details in the works that reflect knowledge particular to a proposed authorship candidate. My first exposure to the notion that Mary Sidney Herbert might have written as William Shakespeare was Robin P. Williams’ Sweet Swan of Avon. Williams compiles a tremendous amount of evidence for sources specific to Mary Sidney. If access to sources is to be used to distinguish candidates it is hard to trump Shakespeare’s use of Thomas Moffet’s On Silkworms and their Flies for Midsummer Night’s Dream when the only copy of that book was a manuscript dedicated to Mary Sidney residing in her Wilton library. Orthodox Stratfordians denigrate this approach which tends to highlight the limitations of his education and exposure to the courtly pastimes and legal and political considerations that appear so often in the works. I personally do not generally find these arguments persuasive either. Given the small number of important courtiers, their literally and figuratively incestuous relationships and the close association of players and writers with the court through patronage and as entertainers, I do not think any area of knowledge would be inaccessible to any determined writer who traveled in those circles. It would be hard to argue for example that Ben Jonson, who came from humble origins and had only a few months of university education, was incapable of writing on any matter he chose, or was somehow excluded from understanding the politics of the court. Of course, this assurance arises from his evident command of classical sources in his notes and writing, the literally hundreds of books we can identify today that were once in his library, and his long and well documented relationships with the most powerful people in the court including specifically Robert Carr, William Herbert, Robert and Mary Sidney and Kings James and Charles but encompassing nearly everyone with an interest in literature, the theater, or the political manuevering of the period.  The Jonson example does proffer a challenge to the conventional attribution to the glover’s son from Stratford. Not that the boy from Stratford could not have become the great author, but how and why did he accomplish it while leaving such a meagre record? For important courtiers like Sidney and de Vere access to information is a simple consequence of their position in the court and suppression of knowledge of their literary activities almost certainly a condition for being allowed to write and publish without scandal. For a commoner like Jonson getting that kind of access left lots of footprints. How did Shakespeare manage without leaving a documentary trail? How was he a famous actor that no one saw act?

Diana Price looked for just that sort of evidence for Shakespeare and reports she can find no direct evidence linking William Shakspere of Stratford to the writing and publication of poems and plays. In contrast every accepted published work of Shakespeare has some contemporary connection to Mary Sidney, and there are documentary connections throughout the period between the Countess and the company that performed the plays as well.

Stratfordians insist that the name William Shakespeare on the published works constitutes proof of identity, but that name did not appear on a play until 1598. Instead, the first plays from Shakespeare’s hand were published under the names of the noble patrons who sponsored the companies that first performed them. The earliest performances are generally accepted to have been by Pembroke’s Men, and they in turn are understood to have been the concern of the literary Countess and not her aging husband, absent in Wales.

Gabriel Harvey’s Gentlewoman

Near the time of publication of Titus Andronicus and Shakespeare’s narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, Gabriel Harvey may have offered the only direct identification of the author published in the period. Harvey was losing his famous pamphlet war with Thomas Nashe when he summoned his “gentlewoman patron” to enter the fray.

According to Matthew Steggle, writing on the Folger Library website, there are currently three main interpretations of Harvey’s Gentlewoman:

Fictitious: She is entirely fictitious. This is a point of view put forward by Nashe, or rather a speaker in Nashe's pamphlet Have With You to Saffron Walden: “I am of the minde that, for all the stormes & tempests Haruey from her denounceth, there is no such woman, but tis onely a Fiction of his.” (Nashe, 3.111, 113). The problem with this hypothesis is put succinctly by Nashe’s twentieth-century editor, R. B. McKerrow: “the device would be so pointless” (Nashe, 5.89).

Mary Sidney: She is Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, whom Harvey praises fervently throughout both these pamphlets. As A. B. Grosart suggested: "Our Glossarial-Index references under ‘gentlewoman’ and under ‘Pembroke’ will satisfy the critical reader that the two were one - that is, that Harvey wished to convey that idea... possibly his ‘wish’ was father to the thought" (Harvey, Works, 3.xxiv). Variants on this position have been taken up by recent critics including Henry Woudhuysen, Penny McCarthy, Matthew Steggle, and Margaret Hannay, whose influential biography of Mary Sidney argues, “Whether the countess herself took any part in this quarrel, Harvey apparently wanted his readers - particularly Nashe - to think that she did" (140-2). This group of critics disagree over whether Harvey merely hints at or actually claims the involvement of Mary Sidney, and they also disagree over, or maintain an agnosticism about, whether or not Mary Sidney really was involved. Penny McCarthy, for instance, argues both that Harvey does unequivocally claim the involvement of the Countess, and that Mary Sidney participated as Harvey describes, writing the poems that the pamphlets attribute to the Gentlewoman: “Why should the sonnets and the rumbustious prose not be Mary's? For no reason but the overdelicate sensibilities of modern critics, it would seem”.

Someone else: She is real, but someone other than Mary Sidney, and it is an error to read Harvey's allusions as if they pointed to Mary Sidney since they are intended to be to someone else. This is the position taken by R. B. McKerrow and Charles Nicholl, among other writers. No specific candidate has yet been put forward.

The significance of Harvey’s gentlewoman is heightened by Harvey’s tantalizing suggestions that she is preparing to release “that fair body of the sweetest Venus in Print, as it is redoubtedly armed with the complete harness of the bravest Minerva. - When his necessary defence hath sufficiently accleared him, whom it principally concerneth to acquit himself: She shall no sooner appear in person, like a new Star in Cassiopeia, but every eye of capacity will see a conspicuous difference between her and other mirrors of Eloquence.”

The bravest Minerva was Pallas Athena, the spear-shaker so often called on as a patron of the theater, and Harvey’s pamphlet was written just weeks before the publication of Shakespeare’s “first heir of my invention,” the narrative poem Venus and Adonis. Other clues hint to a connection between Shakespeare and Harvey’s champion. The poems represented as her response to Nashe contain quotes from Plautus that would shortly appear as lines in Comedy of Errors and Loves Labours Lost. In the latter play they characterize a character named Moth widely accepted as a characterization of Thomas Nashe.

William Covell: That Divine Lady

Discounting Harvey, the Folger Shakespeare Library cites Polimanteia, published in 1595 and attributed to William Covell, as the earliest reference to Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece. The reference appears in the printed marginalia alongside text praising Samuel Daniel’s “court-dear-verse” shown below[1]:

Folger summarizes the marginal comments, “Covell alludes to several other poets, writing of the “Lucrecia” and the “Wanton Adonis” of “Sweet Shakspeare”- that is, Lucrece (1594) and Venus and Adonis (1593), Shakespeare’s two best-selling poems,” but uncharacteristically does not provide a transcript. The full passage reads:

That divine lady was unquestionably Mary Sidney, Daniel’s muse, his “loving Delia” who deserves “everliving praise”, and whose hand produced “Antonie,” her translation of Robert Garnier’s closet drama Marc Antoine. Corinna was a woman poet who reputedly triumphed in a contest of poetry over her student Pindarus, one of the celebrated “nine poets” of ancient Greece. It was also the name of Ovid’s love interest in his Amores. It is not clear why Covell would introduce Shakespeare here if not to express a connection to Daniel’s Delia, the Countess of Pembroke.

William Cory: The man Shakespeare is with us

Mary Sidney is also the source of the only contemporaneous record of the author Shakespeare appearing in the flesh. In 1865 poet and Eton educator William Johnson Cory visited Wilton House where he records in his journal that the then Countess Pembroke entertained a party with a letter from Sidney to her son Philip entreating him to lure newly crowned King James to Wilton with the prospect of meeting “the man Shakespeare.”

While the letter itself is lost, likely in a late 19th century fire at Wilton that consumed many Sidney manuscripts, the contents are corroborated by an extant letter from Dudley Carlton to John Chamberlain dated November 27, 1603.

James did come to Wilton. Plague in London prevented the newly crowned King from celebrating his coronation and occupying Whitehall Palace which had become the primary home of the Queen and her government. Instead, the new King and his court skirted the city and moved west in an extended progress before spending most of the fall encamped at Wilton House. 

Orthodox scholars are happy to accept the letter as proof that William Shakespeare was a living breathing person, while some supporters of alternate candidates are skeptical – it seems too convenient, this key piece of evidence which has disappeared so that we cannot test its authenticity. Both miss the real significance. When James became king, the Lord Chamberlain of the Household was George Carey, son of Henry Carey, the Queen’s cousin/illegitimate brother. The Carey’s had been instrumental in arranging the succession in favor of James. George’s brother Robert was with the Queen when she died and quietly slid the ring of office from her finger and raced to Scotland to bring both news and ring to James.  James immediately gathered supporters and marched for London to ensure that none of the English claimants through the Grey family line could rally support to contest his claim. As Lord Chamberlain George Carey would have been responsible for managing the court, finding lodging and provisions and arranging entertainment as they traveled. However, George was at this point dying from advanced syphilis and unable to travel, let alone fulfil those responsibilities. Unwilling to remove an ally, James arranged to quietly transfer his responsibilities to others who could keep the court functioning in the meantime. As part of these arrangements, James personally became the sponsor of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, henceforth they would be the King’s Men. He also made the company sharers gentlemen of the chamber, servants of his household.

Aubrey: Shakespeare was “not a company keeper”

How then could a promise to provide Shakespeare be an inducement to the King? Surely he would simply appear when summoned with the rest of the acting company to perform at court? The answer may come from notes of the antiquarian John Aubrey, famous for his Brief Lives, a collection of short biographical profiles of famous Englishman compiled starting 1680 but not published until much later. His printed entry in the original 1813 edition includes some apocryphal anecdotes and a few observations gleaned from Jonson but adds nothing which modern scholarship retains to our understanding of the author. However, his manuscript notes include a curious remembrance which editors excluded from the printed work. The one source he found that claimed to have firsthand knowledge of Shakespeare, an aging actor named William Beeston whose father Christopher had been a boy actor with the King’s Men and after an impresario who ran a competing theatre called the Cockpit, recalled that

“The more to be admired q[uia] he was not a company keeper lived in Shoreditch, would n[o]t be debauched, & if invited to (court?): he was in paine.”[2] Hardly the traditional image of Shakespeare as roguish actor and wastrel portrayed by Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love, but a perhaps a convenient excuse for
a Countess writing under an assumed name.

The onlie begetter of these sonnets Mr. W.H.

Enormous amounts of scholarly effort have gone toward establishing a connection between Shakespeare and Henry Wriothesley, the young Earl of Southampton who was the dedicatee of the two early narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece. So far nothing has turned up to supplement the dedications themselves. There are no records of payment from the Earl, nothing to indicate Shakespeare had lodged with him, nothing to suggest that they knew one another at all. A folk tradition that Southampton gave the bard a thousand pounds is dismissed on the grounds that as ward of William Cecil he had no money to share at the time. Then again if, as some scholars believe, Southampton was also the W.H. (initials reversed) who was the “onlie begetter” of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, published in 1609 but likely written much earlier, he would not have been likely to reward Shakespeare anyway. The argument for Southampton is that Shakespeare wrote the first 17 “procreation” sonnets to persuade the eligible Wriothesley to marry Cecil’s granddaughter, Elizabeth de Vere. As Cecil’s ward Southampton could be compelled to marry or forced to compensate Cecil with a sum comparable to the dowry he might have demanded. Southampton opted to pay an enormous fine of 5000 pounds rather than accept the match.

In any case, a different W.H. has been often viewed as more likely, William Herbert, elder son of Mary Sidney. If the original purpose of the sonnets was to inspire a young man to marriage, Herbert provides an embarrassing wealth of potential matches to promote. In 1595 an arrangement was made to have Herbert, then just 15, marry a different Elizabeth, the granddaughter of Henry Carey, then Lord Chamberlain and patron of Shakespeare’s acting company. Herbert refused, reportedly on grounds of “not liking,” disappointing hopes to join the two politically important families. Two years later a deal was struck to wed Herbert to a different de Vere sister, Bridget, but foundered over the details of the dowry. Having disappointed the Lord Chamberlain and the Lord Treasurer, Herbert went right to the top, after admitting to fathering a child on Mary Fitton, a Maid of Honor to Queen Elizabeth, he refused the Queen’s direct order to marry. She sent him to the Tower of London to think on it, only releasing him after the child was stillborn, possibly due to congenital syphilis. Fitton was long considered a likely candidate for the “dark lady” of the sonnets but a portrait for her which turned up in the early twentieth century revealed her to be fair. However, by that time another, dark haired, mistress of Herbert had turned up. Herbert family records discovered in 1925 revealed that Herbert had two children by his cousin, Mary Sidney Wroth. The original suspicions that Wroth’s Urania was a roman a clef for court intrigues could now be matched to the sonnets with Wroth as dark lady and rival poet and her aunt Mary Sidney identified as the jealous writer.

The Incomparable Paire of Brethren

William Herbert also provides the most obvious, indisputable connection to Shakespeare, the dedication of the First Folio to Mary’s sons. the “incomparable paire of brethren,” William and Philip Herbert.

As Lord Chamberlain charged with governing all publication and also a generous patron in his own right, William Herbert was the subject of many dedications during this period. After 1625 when William was promoted to Lord Steward and Philip replaced him as Chamberlain, Philip also received many dedications. Only a handful of publications were dedicated to both, all published by Folio publisher Edward Blount and involving the Sidney circle writers who contributed to the preface materials. Blount had succeeded William Ponsonby (to whom he was apprenticed) as the favored publisher for the Sidney/Herberts.  The specific language of the dedication reinforces the notion that this was not a pro forma decision but that the dedication recognized a special connection between the Herberts and the author. The writer of the epistle hopes for their favor “since your L.L. have beene pleas'd to thinke these trifles some-thing, heeretofore; and have prosequuted both them, and their Authour living, with so much favour.” While there is no record of patronage of Shakespeare from the Herberts, or anyone else, this comes close. The term trifles has occasioned some controversy, particularly among those scholars who believe that Ben Jonson wrote the dedication for Heminges and Condell and therefore see “trifles” as further disparagement of the author from his envious rival. A likelier explanation is that it echoes the phrasing of Philip Sidney’s dedication of his Arcadia to his sister Mary, “For indeed, for seuerer eies it is not, being but a trifle, and that trifling-ly handled.” Other language in both dedications suggests an even closer relationship. Philip offers Arcadia as a foundling child for Mary’s care “For my part, in very trueth (as the cruell fathers among the Greekes, were woont to doe to the babes they would not foster) I could well finde in my heart, to cast out in some desert of forgetfulnesse this childe, which I am loath to father.” Similarly, Heminges and Condell seek “to procure his Orphanes, Guardians;” hoping “you will use the like indulgence toward them, you have done unto their parent.” Of course, if Mary is Shakespeare both plays and the dedicatees themselves are orphans of the same parent. The notion of orphan plays also recalls the final stanza of Jonson’s to Penshurst which we saw earlier identifies Mary as author.

If the dedication was intended by Jonson to revive the reference to To Penshurst, the request to make allowance for the authors’ limitations provides another connection, “in the Country hands reach foorth milke, creame, fruites, or what they have: and many Nations (we have heard) that had not gummes & incense, obtained their requests with a leavened Cake. It was no fault to approach their Gods, by what meanes they could,” is almost identical to a passage translated from the dedication of Pliny’s Natural History, “I am well aware, that, placed as you are in the highest station, and gifted with the most splendid eloquence and the most accomplished mind, even those who come to pay their respects to you, do it with a kind of veneration: on this account I ought to be careful that what is dedicated to you should be worthy of you. But the country people, and, indeed, some whole nations offer milk to the Gods, and those who cannot procure frankincense substitute in its place salted cakes; for the Gods are not dissatisfied when they are worshiped by every one to the best of his ability. But my temerity will appear the greater by the consideration, that these volumes, which I dedicate to you, are of such inferior importance.” The Pliny passage was a favorite of Jonson, particularly in reference to the Sidney family. He echoes it in To Penshurst describing how “all come in, the farmer and the clown, And no one empty-handed, to salute Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit. Some bring a capon, some a rural cake, Some nuts, some apples; some that think they make The better cheeses bring them, or else send By their ripe daughters, whom they would commend This way to husbands, and whose baskets bear An emblem of themselves in plum or pear. But what can this (more than express their love) Add to thy free provisions, far above The need of such?” He recalls the same passage again in the dedication of his play The Alchemist “to the lady “most deserving her name and blood: Lady Mary (Sidney) Wroth.”

For the story of how Mary was discredited and removed from the Shakespeare story see: That Women Are But Men's Shadows

[1] Covell, William, Polimantiea 1595

[2] “MS Aubrey 8, Folio 50 Verso.”

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I’m Dave Richardson. While I am a career academic, I am neither a historian nor an English Lit professor. I have a PhD in Marketing Science, my academic expertise is in statistics and game theory which I use to study how consumers’ choices reflect the information available to them. As part of my research I have spent decades studying theories of knowledge and behavior and how they evolved over time. I have found that people dislike asking hard questions about their world, and once they find acceptable answers they tend to leave well enough alone, sometimes for many centuries. As a result really interesting new ideas about how to interpret information do not emerge uniformly across recorded history but appear in bursts of a few decades, even a few years and then subside again into settled wisdom. For my work these critical moments occurred in Ancient Greece in the time of Plato, in the late Renaissance in the groundwork for the enlightenment and in the early twentieth century when modern statistics and choice theory became regularized into the foundations of economics. Each time these questions are asked new answers open new possibilities for learning at the cost of leaving alternative ways of thinking in the past. As an academic I am interested in how people respond to complex problems when they have little information with which to understand them. In seeking what was lost in modern economic theory I became an expert on the history of Epistemology (the branch of Philosophy that considers the nature of knowledge) and of Scientific Method (itself a branch of Epistemology).

The Elizabethan Renaissance was a pivotal period when such patterns were established for how men engaged their world that continue to shape our behavior and understanding. At the center of this world of ideas was Elizabeth’s leading scholar, mathematician, book collector and sometime mystic Dr. John Dee. Understanding Dee’s complex view of his world on the cusp of industrial and scientific transformation became something of an obsession. Soon my expertise extended to NeoPlatonic Philosophy and its neer-do-well offspring alchemy and their relation to the religious schisms of the sixteenth century.

My Life as Lord Chamberlain

In 2018 my interest in the Elizabethan Renaissance led me to audition for the Bristol Renaissance Faire which recreates the Queen’s progress to Bristol England during the summer of 1574. I had hoped to portray Dee, so I could share my knowledge of Renaissance science and philosophy.

Instead I was assigned the role of Henry Carey, Baron Hunsdon, and, as future Lord Chamberlain, Shakespeare’s patron, although he would not gain that office until more than a decade after the year we portray.

Wikipedia told me Hunsdon was an unpolished, rough-spoken soldier who drank a lot and had 14 legitimate children and more by mistresses scattered about England.

My research revealed a circumspect but powerful and effective politician who with his son-in-law sponsored the two most important acting companies of the age. Carey was likely the bastard son of Henry VIII by his mistress Mary Boleyn. Unfortunately he suffered from extraordinarily poor timing throughout his life. When Henry was born in 1525 the king had already acknowledged one bastard son as Henry Fitzroy and on his sixth birthday made him Duke of Richmond and Somerset, establishing the boy as a potential heir if he failed to sire a legitimate son. By the time Henry Carey was born the prospect of a son by Katherine of Aragon was fading and the King began to entertain the idea of another Queen. His eye fell upon Anne Boleyn, sister to the mistress who had already born him two children (Henry had an older sister Catherine). As Henry’s strategy to obtain a divorce was to claim that his marriage to Katherine was incestuous by virtue of her previous marriage to his brother Arthur, it would have been impolitic to admit to fathering children with the sister of the woman he intended to marry. Henry Carey would not be made a Duke on his sixth birthday.

He was however brought to court at the age of two . When his nominal father William Carey died of sweating sickness in 1528, Henry became the ward of his Aunt Anne, who kept him nearby, a perfect little red haired copy of the King to remind him what marriage to a Boleyn girl could bring. When he was nine years old Carey learned to keep his secret. John Hale, a Catholic Vicar opposed to the king’s efforts to divorce, asked the young man about his father, and was imprudent enough to share the boy’s answer in a letter to the Privy Council. He was executed two week later.

After Anne’s execution, Henry and his sister Catherine remained in the royal household at Hunsdon where they were raised with their ¾ sister Elizabeth. During the precarious years of Mary’s reign when Elizabeth was viewed as a potential threat to the Catholic monarch, Henry provided funds and sometimes a home to his sister. When Elizabeth became Queen she made Catherine Carey first lady of the bedchamber, the person closest to her at all times. Henry was created Baron Hunsdon for the childhood home they had shared, and later made keeper of Somerset House the sprawling castle on the Strand. He was also called on to lead the army every time Elizabeth was seriously threatened. He won the only real battle of the 1570 Northern Uprising despite being ambushed and vastly outnumbered. He commanded the land forces awaiting the arrival of the Spanish Armada.

In her 2008 dissertation, ‘No Other Faction but My Own’: Dynastic Politics and Elizabeth I’s Carey Cousins, Kristin Bundesen details how the Carey family wielded unrecognized power through their access to the Queen,  and sheer numbers augmented by strategic marriages to extend their family network. In addition to Henry’s 17 known children his sister Catherine had another 17 of her own. Among these was Lettice Knollys who married successively Walter Devereux Earl of Essex and Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester. Her eldest son was Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex who dominated the politics of the 1590s. By the time of Henry Carey’s death in 1596 the Careys controlled a majority of the House of Commons just among their own cousins and relations by marriage. Robert Dudley called them the ‘Tribe of Dan’ after the prolific biblical patriarch.

As a member of the Bristol court I was daily interacting with many of the personalities that would come to shape Shakespeare’s theatre. William Cecil and his daughter Anne, Walsingham and his daughter Frances, Leicester, the Sidneys, Lord Admiral Howard and of course the Queen were all friends I talked, interacted, even danced with.

I began to wonder how Shakespeare fit into all this. I had an independent interest in Shakespeare by virtue of my address, in 2012 I bought a house on Shakespeare Avenue in Chicago, without paying much attention to the name. My daughter was nine years old at the time and we thought that was an excellent age to begin to encounter the plays of Shakespeare. Chicago is an excellent theater city and offered multiple Shakespeare productions each month. We saw 22 that first year. My daughter participated in a workshop group that developed life skills for girls through studying Shakespeare, the Viola project, run by a group of young actresses with a passion for Shakespeare. Shakespeare began to be another of my Elizabethan friends, however unlike the others I did not have a face or a person to attach to the writer. I read the biographies from Wells, Bate, Schoenbaum, Duncan-Jones, but the pieces of Shakespeare didn’t add up to a character I could relate to. And I began to see all the surely, must haves and could haves and to wonder if maybe those traditional biographies were trying so hard but coming up short because they had the wrong man.

I had a hard time seeing Bacon or Oxford as Shakespeare (Oxford’s wife Anne and sister Mary did not create a flattering impression of the Earl who was off in Italy in 1574 and Bacon was too busy being a know it all) but when I encountered Robin William’s book Sweet Swan of Avon suggesting Mary Sidney it felt more plausible. The Sidney’s had just the right mix of political access and literary aspiration. I was intrigued but not convinced.

An Acceptable Authorship Question

One of the resources we relied on to inform our efforts to accurately portray the Elizabethan court on progress was a curious book published in 1575 but quickly withdrawn. In August 1575 Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester hosted the biggest party of the Elizabethan age, a three week spectacular entertainment intended as a last ditch effort to convince Queen Elizabeth to marry him. It did not work, Elizabeth soon tired of the relentless wooing and fled the scene several days early with the poet George Gascoigne chasing after her spouting verses he had composed but not yet delivered.

. Queen Elizabeth arrives at Kenilworth

We know a lot about the event because of a letter purportedly written by Robert Laneham, a sort of sergeant at arms for the privy council, to a friend in London.

The letter portrays its author as a pompous fool while offering details of the Queen’s reactions that suggest the author is someone quite close to her. When it was printed just weeks after the event, Laneham immediately protested to William Cecil that he was not the author and was being abused. William Patton, a writer and retainer of Leicester who help produce the event apologized and admitted authoring the letter but doubts about authorship persist.

The authorship of the Laneham letter is currently unsettled among academics. Some think Laneham is the author and is protesting that his letter was published, some that Patton wrote the work and still others that Patton was covering for the real author to spare political embarrassment. One explanation for the existence and rapid publication of the letter is that it fulfilled a need to report the outcome of Leicester’s gambit to the broader Dudley faction. The writer is in a position to closely observe and report the Queen’s reaction, but might not want to be blamed for betraying that trust. That Patton was involved seems certain. The letter uses Patton’s unusual orthography (spelling), notice all the oo’s and z’s. Only seven published documents survive that do, four are Patton’s.

The tone and character of the writing suggest a young writer of substantial talent with a satirist’s view of court pretensions. Philip Sidney (21) had recently returned from his European tour and was cup bearer for the Queen. He is briefly parodied as a gangly red headed bridegroom in a mock marriage that Elizabeth avoided. Mary (13) had just joined the court as a Maid of Honor (a term she invented). The writer identifies himself as “el Principe Negro” and with the “warrant of the Black Prince”, Ich Dien  (I serve), traditionally associated with the heir to the throne. Philip was Dudley’s heir presumptive. He also speaks of long service to “the Lady Sidney”, the mother of Philip and Mary. Neither Laneham nor Patton is connected to the Sidneys, but her children might make that claim. Both would develop into celebrated writers. Could they have contributed to the letter? I thought perhaps with some research I could find out.

After reading various articles about the letter I came across a more interesting potential guide. In 1625, on the 50th anniversary of the entertainment, Prince Charles visited Kenilworth, which he had purchased from Dudley’s bastard son.

Travelling with the prince was Ben Jonson, the greatest writer of the period after Shakespeare. Two years past editing the Shakespeare folio and somewhat past his prime, Jonson was still a royal favorite as a writer of Masques for the Court. As an entertainment for the visit Jonson wrote a piece he titled The Masque of Owles at Kenelworth, Presented by the Ghost of Captain Coxe mounted on his Hoby-horse. Although we do not think it was performed as a masque, it was probably read to the court for the occasion.

Capt. Cox had presented a traditional reenactment of a medieval battle at the 1575 Entertainment (twice since the first time the Queen was preoccupied with dancing). The description of his library is the primary attraction of the Langham Letter to bibliographers. As Jonson was very close to the Sidney family, his primary patrons throughout his career, I had hopes that he might disclose some bit of family history that might link them to the letter. The Masque makes many references to the Entertainment, and invites identification with then current historical personages but offers no obvious clues to the authorship of the Letter. I had a new challenge, to learn to read Ben Jonson as he demanded in the first poem of his epigrams:

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Note the reference to Ovid's Elegy 15 once more, Nor Fire, nor cankring Age, as Naso said, Of his, thy wit-fraught Booke shall once invade. ‘Moniment’ is an archaic usage that could substitute for the current ‘monument’ but more properly referred to a repository of documents, as Jonson’s prior usage referring to the folio itself as ‘a moniment without a tomb.’ Still the combination of Stratford, Avon and monument would eventually steer readers to Trinity Church in Stratford where at some point they would have found the familiar half figure funerary monument inscribed to William Shakespeare. For details of the monument and a wealth of contextual information there is nothing to compare with Craig Smith’s website . Smith offers a number of observations about the monument:

1.      The book cushion is inappropriate for a portrait of a lay person.

2.      Shakespeare is wearing an academic gown to which he has no claim.

3.      The lettering on the monument does not match that of other Johnson work.

4.      The spear on the shield should be half round, in the style of other Johnson monuments.

5.      The right hand is poised above the cushion, not resting on it.

6.      The right hand ought to be carved in relief, rather than in the round.

7.      The face of the demifigure violates rules of proportion with respect to the length of the nose and width of the mouth.

8.      The lips are parted, contrary to the practice in portraiture of the period.

9.      The upper lip is shaved between mustache and nose in a fashion not typical of the period.

10.  A satisfying portrait head is produced when the lips are closed and errors of proportion corrected.

He concludes that the monument was intended for another person, likely an academic associated with Oxford, and that it was purchased by or for Shakespeare when the original commission fell through. That it originally depicted the figure holding a book and the somewhat ludicrous current presentation with pen and paper over the utterly unsuitable writing surface was added later. And that the original sculpting of the face was reworked to produce the current odd effect with shortened nose and anachronistic facial hair. He suggests that William of Stratford arranged the purchase before his death, but only because there are no records in the will or after to suggest anyone else did it.

The evidence for dating the monument consists of three sources. William Dugdale sketched the monument probably in 1649 for his vast volume Antiquities of Warwickshire. Although much has been made about differences between the sketch and the monument as it exists today, Smith concludes that these are likely the result of Dugdale making a sketch from memory, and possibly from the afore mentioned changes to hands and face, but that the general form as recorded by Dugdale is likely consistent with the current monument. Before Dugdale the monument inscription appears in notes of John Weever. E.A. Honigmann argues for a date as early as 1617 but Weever’s visit cannot be assigned with certainty prior to 1632. The third source is Digges’ poem. Since Digges’ must be referring to the funeral figure in Trinity Church it cannot be later than 1623.

Unless he is not thinking of Stratford upon Avon at all, and instead refers to another monument and another Stratford. Could Mary Sidney have a Stratford monument that is a more fitting symbol of timeless endurance?

Samuel Daniel, who gave us the sonnet that would identify Mary as Sweet Swan of Avon, provides a possible alternative. In his Musophilus, a tribute to Philip Sidney, he describes a monument on the plain near Wilton that was an object of speculation for Elizabethans

Stonehenge was a popular day trip from Wilton. King James and the court visited while they were encamped waiting out the London plague in fall of 1603. To reach the monument from Wilton, travelers would have had to pass the small town which contained the bridge across the Wiltshire Avon connecting Wilton and Salisbury. It was (and is still) named Stratford sub-Castle for the bridge and the ancient hilltop fort known as Old Sarum that was looted for stones to build Wilton House.

If Digges meant Stonehenge instead of the smug pig butcher in Stratford upon Avon, we open the possibility that William of Stratford was not connected with the folio at all, until someone added the monument in Trinity Church to provide an alternative to Mary as solution to the folio riddles revealing the author’s identity. We have already made the case that William Herbert had personal and political reasons to obscure his mother’s authorship. The identity of the sculptor of the Trinity Church figure adds one more intriguing possibility. Smith attributes the monument with some certainty to Nicholas Jonson, partially on its similarity to a larger monument he constructed circa 1618-19 for the 5^th Earl of Rutland, Roger Manners. Manners had been dead by that time for several years, but his wife Elizabeth had just passed likely inspiring the creation of the monument. As Elizabeth had quarreled over the estate with Manner’s brother who succeeded to the title it is unlikely he would have borne the cost of the extravagant monument. Perhaps the most likely source of funds was Elizabeth’s cousin William Herbert, as she was the only daughter of Philip Sidney.

This concludes my consideration of the First Folio paratexts. If you wish to know more about the connections between Mary Sidney and Shakespeare you could go here: Shakespeare's Shadow: What does Mary Sidney have to do with Shakespeare anyway?

For the story of how Mary was discredited and removed from the Shakespeare story see: That Women Are But Men's Shadows

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In the final section of the poem Jonson turns to the Art and Nature of poetry. Once again we see lines that echo Ovid’s Amores 1.15, the elegy about poetry conferring immortality upon its author which forms the structural and critical backbone of Jonson’s work. Ovid’s Kingly shows and gold bearing banks of the Tagus,  

Become the flights upon the bankes of Thames, That so did take Eliza, and our James.

Ovid’s expectation to transcend death,

becomes stellification in Jonson 

Notice how Jonson even rhymes Ovid’s bite and right with night and light.

For the discussion of the art of poetry Jonson turns from Ovid to his own Muse, the Latin poet Horace and specifically to the Ars Poetica he translated three times (including the lost annotated version he claims was consumed in an office fire just before the publication of the folio). Commentators starting with Dryden criticized Jonson for ‘Jonsonifying’ Shakespeare by applying Jonson’s standards to his rival’s works

Jonson’s translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica

'Tis now inquir'd which makes the nobler verses
Nature, or Art. My judgement will not pierce
Into the profits, what a meer rude braine
Can, or all toyle, without a wealthy vaine:
So doth the one, the others helpe require,
And friendly should unto their end conspire.
He that's ambitious in the race to touch
The wished Goale, both did and suffered much
While he was young: he sweat, and freez'd again,
If to Quinctilius you recited ought,
He'd say mend this my friend, and this, 'tis nought.
If you deny'd, you had no better straine,
And twice, or thrice assay'd it, but in vain
He'd bid blot all; and to the Anvill bring
Those ill-torn'd verses to new hammering.
Then, if your fault you rather had defend
Then change; no word nor work more would he spend
In vaine, but you, and yours you should love still
Alone, without a rivall at your will.
A good and wise man will crye open shame
On artlesse Verse; the hard ones he will blame:
Blot out the carelesse with his turned pen;
Cut off superfluous ornaments; and, when
They're dark, bid cleare 'hem; al thats doubtful wrote
Dispute; and what is to be changed, note:
Become an Aristarchus: And, not say,
Why should I grieve a friend this trifling way?
These trifles into serious mischiefs lead
The man once mock'd, and suffered wrong to tread.

In this passage we see a unity of purpose in Jonson which encompasses not just his poem, but the whole of the preface materials and even his conversations with Drummond and the comments on Shakespeare preserved in his notebooks and printed in Discoveries.

The letter To the Great Variety of Readers reports of Shakespeare, “as he was a happie imitator of Nature, was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarse received from him a blot in his papers.” Jonson’s biographer Ian Donaldson believes this is “indisputably the work of Heminges and Condell themselves” even as he argues that the rest of the letter is by Jonson. It is another cornerstone of Shakespeare biography that his fellows testified about the scripts he provided them. Jonson’s notebooks printed posthumously as Discoveries ostensibly provide his less flattering response:

Early 20^th century skeptic Sir George Greenwood in his Jonson and Shakespeare made the argument against accepting the players’ assertion at face value.

A less absurd speculation is that Jonson is up to something we haven’t quite sussed out yet, and that all of these references are pointers to the Horace excerpt from Ars Poetica above.

Jonson goes on in Discoveries

We have known for some time that this text is almost a word for word translation of the introduction to the elder Seneca’s Controversiae 4.  Although Jonson may have thought it apropos for Shakespeare, we cannot demand that every word written about an orator from ancient Rome was intended to apply to Shakespeare so many centuries later. Again, more likely that Jonson intended to employ the allusion to a more subtle point and so recorded the translation in his journal attached to the name Shakespeare.

The final couplets of Horace’s letter might explain why Drummond observed that he was `given rather to losse a friend, than a Jest'

If Jonson was to give praise to the author, while respecting his constraints to conceal her identity as suggested in my last post (neither Man nor Muse can praise too much), he could not enlist suitable peers to contribute original poems as Jonson had done for his own folio. To grant Sidney the praise that she warranted, Jonson instead used both overt and covert textual clues that link to previously printed accolades directed toward the countess from the greatest writers of the period, writers that like Jonson counted her as friend, mentor, teacher, and exemplar as well as patron. Specifically, Jonson references passages from Christopher Marlowe (his dedication to the Countess from Watson’s posthumous Amyntae Gaudia 1592), Samuel Daniel (Delia and the dedication to Cleopatra), and Michael Drayton (the Shepheard’s Garland

Several lines in this final section suggest the dedication Christopher Marlowe provided for the posthumous publication of Thomas Watson’s Amyntae Gaudia just before Marlowe’s own death in 1593. Marlowe hails Sidney as Delia born of a laurel-crowned race in whom virtue finds refuge from the assault of barbarism and ignorance, and who impartest now to my rude pen breathings of a lofty rage, whereby my poor self hath, methinks, power to surpass what my unripe talent is wont to bring forth. Marlowe sees her immortalized, crowned as by a starry diadem Ariadne.[1]

Sweet Swan of Avon points us to Samuel Daniel’s Sonnet 48 from his Delia, dedicated to the Countess of Pembroke. Avon, poor in fame, and poor in waters, Shall have my song, where Delia hath her seat[2]. Delia is generally identified with Sidney, as is confirmed by the Marlowe dedication just considered, and the Avon where she hath her seat flows through Wilton, the vast Pembroke estate in Wiltshire, by Salisbury cathedral where Mary is buried, and on past Mary’s own Ivychurch just downstream. Although the poem was composed 20 years before, it reads like an indictment of the whole enterprise of the Folio, God forbid I should my papers blot with mercenary lines with servile pen, praising virtues in them that have them not. And with my verse respects not Thames, nor theatres, in echoing the motto Daniel seems to explicitly reject the politics of court and stage that necessitate the concealment of Mary’s identity.

It is worth reading the entire poem.

None other fame mine unambitious Muse 
Affected ever but t'eternise thee; 
All other honours do my hopes refuse, 
Which meaner prized and momentary be. 
For God forbid I should my papers blot 
With mercenary lines with servile pen, 
Praising virtues in them that have them not, 
Basely attending on the hopes of men. 
No, no, my verse respects not Thames, nor theatres; 
Nor seeks it to be known unto the great; 
But Avon, poor in fame, and poor in waters, 
Shall have my song, where Delia hath her seat. 
Avon shall be my Thames, and she my song; 
No other prouder brooks shall hear my wrong.
Samuel Daniel 
Delia, Sonnet 48

The structure and language of the poem indicate it too draws upon the Ovid elegy that shapes Jonson’s poem. Daniel’s poem is also inspired by Horace, the beginning of his third book of Odes, “Odi profanum vulgus et arceo;” “I hate the sacrilegious mob and keep it at a distance.” This same phrase provided the motto for the 1595 Olney publication of Philip Sidney’s Apologie of Poetrie[3] (elsewhere published as Defense of Poesy).

As discussed previously Daniel’s dedication to Cleopatra includes the lines Now when so many Pennes (like Speares) are charg’d, To chase away this tyrant of the North; Grosse Barbarisme…  and so joins Philip Sidney and Mary in the race whose true filed lines seem to shake a lance As brandish't at the eyes of Ignorance. 

The final source we will examine is Michael Drayton’s Idea, the shepheards garland, fashioned in nine eglogs.

The sixth eglog takes the form of a dialogue between Good Gorbo, who laments that virtue has no place left in the world and Perkin who answers that there is one, Pandora (Mary Sidney) who ensures that virtue will never die. Thames fairest Swanne gives us the other half of Sweet Swan of Avon. Wonder of Britaine, whilst Phæbus crowne, adornes the starrie skie, match overt language in Jonson referencing Mary’s brother Philip.

There are surely other commendatory verses woven into the eulogy. Language in the poem suggests Spenser from Shepherds Calendar and Time’s Ruine, Daniel’s Cleopatra, Jonson’s To Penshurst. Although identifying these will help us to further understand Jonson’s poem, I have not found evidence of Jonson’s intent so clear as to help the argument for the Sidney identification.

The passage draws heavily on the same Horace poem, Ars Poetica, that provides Bellamy instructions on the use of anagram and confirms both the sources and Mary Sidney as author with yet more embedded anagrams. Supporting the obvious parallels with the text, we have Marlowe and Amyntas anagrams in the corresponding locations. For Drayton Shepheards, Garlande and Idea are all present as anagrams. Here Muses anvile is a compact (but not perfect) anagram for Samuel, and And himself an anagram of Daniel. Other than the straightforward did Eliza for Delia, the covert links to Daniel are less conventional. Shake…Sight and Since… night form sL eight or 48 if we accept the usual substitution s for x and Latin symbol L for fifty in our construction. Daniel’s sonnet appeared with different numbering in earlier editions, but was the forty eighth in the 1623 edition released just before the Shakespeare folio.

Yet must I not give Nature all: Thy Art,
My gentle [Shakespeare, must enjoy a part;                     [Shepherds]
[For though the Poets]] matter, [Nature be,                     [Fr Meres]
His Art doth give the fashion. And], that he,                  [Drayton]
Who [casts to write a] living line, must sweat,                 [Cleopatra]
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the [Muses anvile]: turne the same,                         [Samuel]
([And himselfe] with it) that he thinkes to frame;             [Daniel]
Or for the lawrell, he [may [gaine a scorne]],         [Marlowe] [Garlande]
For a good Poet's made, as well as borne.   [Penshurst]
And such wert thou. Looke how the fathers face
Lives in his issue, even so, the race
Of Shakespeares minde, [and manners] brightly shines   [Amyntas]
[In his well toned, and true-filed lines:                               [Idea]
In each of which, he seemes to [shake a] Lance,                 [48]
As brandish't] at the eyes of Ignorance.

Sweet swan of Avon! what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appeare,

And make those flights upon the bankes of Thames,

That so [did take Eliza], and our James!                          [Delia]
But [stay], I see thee in the Hemisphere                          [Sidney]
Advanc'd, and made a Constellation there!
Shine forth, thou Starre of Poets, and with rage,

Or influence, chide, or cheere the drooping Stage;
Which, [[since thy] flight] fro' hence, hath mourn'd like night, [Sidney]  [48]
And despaires day, but for thy Volumes light.

This concludes the analysis of Jonson’s encomium. I am satisfied that this reading reflects a cohesive intention from Jonson, and satisfactorily explains the apparent allusions. Thus it represents a coherent reading in the sense of Empson’s vision of textual analysis described in Reading with Understanding: the Hermeneutic Circle.

While recognizing it challenges widely held beliefs about Shakespeare, I believe this is a substantial advance on any of the existing puablished analyses of the poem and is consistent with other evidence about the author.

It is not however the end of my analysis of the First Folio paratexts. Jonson’s poem provides only the first half Sweet Swan of Avon, which appears to point to Stratford upon Avon for the origen of the author. Stratford makes an appearance in a different poem, when Leonard Digges refers to a Stratford moniment which will crumble to dust ere the author is forgotten.

That story continues here: Thy Stratford Moniment.

[1] Mark Eccles, Christopher Marlowe in London, Christopher Marlowe in London (Harvard University Press, 2013), 166, https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674330719.

[2] Samuel Daniel, The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Samuel Daniel: Ed., with Memorial-Introduction and a Glossarial Index Embracing Notes and Illustrations (Hazell, Watson and Viney, limited, 1885), 75.

[3] ajeyaseelan, “An Apologie for Poetrie. c. 1583 (Printed 1595),” Collection at Bartleby.com, October 13, 2022, 1, https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/elizabethan-critical-essays/an-apologie-for-poetrie-c-1583-printed-1595.

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Wits to Read: Francis Meres and Shakespeare’s “Small Latin”

In the Ode “to my beloved the author” which prefaces the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works, Ben Jonson promises the author, thou art alive still, while thy Booke doth live, And we have wits to read, and praise to give.^[1] This is traditionally glossed as a conventional assertion that the author will achieve immortality through the enduring popularity of his work, flattering of Shakespeare to be sure, but of no particular significance. However, Jonson’s promise is unconventionally conditional. That the author will be remembered while the work is read is tautological rather than prophetic. But Jonson asserts that even more is required; we will also need “wits to read” to preserve the author’s memory, even if the works endure. The requirement that readers approach works actively and intelligently is a constant in Jonson’s work. His collection Epigrams begins with a two-line poem To the Reader that implores,

Pray thee, take care, that taks’st my Book in hand,

To read it well: that is, to understand.^[2]

In the folio eulogy itself Jonson warns of the dangers of ignorant readers misinterpreting his words.

For seeliest Ignorance on these may light,

Which, when it sounds at best, but eccho's right;

Or blinde Affection, which doth ne're advance

The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance;

Fortunately for modern scholars puzzling out Jonson’s meaning, he tells us exactly what we need to remedy our deficiency. Both “Wits” and the lists of contemporary and classical writers that follow would have brought to mind Francis Meres’ Palladis Tamia: Wits treasury being the second part of Wits common wealth^[3] for Jonson’s readers.

Francis Meres was a cleric who received Masters degrees from both Cambridge and Oxford in the early 1590s. Meres is remembered for his commonplace book, Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury, published in 1598 and reprinted several times in the succeeding century. Commonplace books like Palladis Tamia were popular in Elizabethan England. They served as compendiums of common wisdom and frequently quoted passages for readers who might struggle with the demands on memory and scholarship created by the richly allusive writing of the time. Ted Tregear’s Anthologizing Shakespeare, 1593 to 1603 provides a fascinating look into early modern use of such books to by examining period annotations.  Meres is familiar to modern scholars because it contains a section of comparisons between ancient and early modern writers, full of details about his contemporaries writing and lives. It also provides the earliest testament to William Shakespeare as a playwright, attributing to him a eight early plays for which we have no prior record or which were previously only attributed to the company of players^[4] (Originally Pembroke’s Men, later, Sussex’, Derby’s, or the Lord Chamberlain’s as their patronage evolved). Jonson’s “Wits” reference and subsequent lists of writers old and new invites the reader to find the passages in Meres that correspond with the text in the poem and read them together to discover his meaning.

Jonson references three distinct passages in Meres. The stanza following “wits to read and praise to give” implies that the author is an aristocrat and not the commoner reflected in Shakespeare’s place in Meres lists of best for comedy and tragedy. Disproportioned was used in period to denote persons of substantially different station, a commoner with a nobleman. It could also denote sexual distinctions; a man was disproportioned as a woman. Note how the language in the passage reinforces the Meres identification; mixing Muses is exactly what Meres does, and the line ends yeeres and peeres rhyme his name.

Jonson tells us that if he, like Meres, had ranked Shakespeare among his peers, he would place him far above Lily and Kid and Marlowe. Peeres in this line is the key to unlocking Jonson’s meaning. Meres proclaims:

“the best for Comedy amongst vs bee, Edward Earle of Oxforde, Doctor Gager of Oxforde, Maister Rowley once a rare Scholler of learned Pembrooke Hall in Cambridge, Maister Edwardes one of her Maiesties Chappell, eloquent and wittie Iohn Lilly, Lodge, Gascoyne, Greene, Shakespeare, Thomas Nash, Thomas Heywood, Anthony Mundye our best plotter, Chapman, Porter, Wilson, Hathway, and Henry Chettle.”^[5]

This is not a list in order of ability unless by an extraordinary coincidence. The men in this list are in strict order of social precedence. The Earl of Oxford is by tradition also Lord High Chancellor. Following Oxford are Doctors and Masters of Oxford and Cambridge Universities, then Lilly, Lodge, Gascoyne and Greene before Shakespeare and other commoners writing for the stage. Gascoyne and Greene come ahead of Shakespeare because they are dead at the time of Meres’ writing. Lodge is a Doctor of Medicine, having abandoned writing, and Lyly has chosen an even more disreputable profession than playwright; he is a member of Parliament in 1598.

Similarly, Meres lists “our best for Tragedie, the Lorde Buckhurst, Doctor Leg of Cambridge, Doctor Edes of Oxforde, maister Edward Ferris, the Authour of the Mirrour for Magistrates, Marlow, Peele, Watson, Kid, Shakespeare, Drayton, Chapman, Decker, and Beniamin Iohnson.” Note again that throughout precise order of precedence is maintained from the most noble Lord Treasurer Buckhurst to the basest writer in England, Jonson himself. Again, the writers that precede Shakespeare, Marlow, Peele, Watson, and Kid are all dead when Meres is writing in 1598.  In order to place Shakespeare “far above Marlow and Kyd”, he would need a title or an advanced university degree.

Small Latin and Lesse Greek

The next couplet is among the most famous and most misunderstood in all of English literature:

Whole books^[6] have been written attempting to interpret “thou hadst Small Latine and Lesse Greeke” and what it tells us about Shakespeare’s education, biography, and fluency. Few have noticed that the line continues – “from thence to honour thee, I would not seek for names.” Small Latine and Lesse Greeke are names, specifically the names of those ancients Meres compares to Mary Sidney:

Octavia, sister unto Augustus, was Octavia Minor, literally small. Sappho is of course of Lesbos. Hence Mary Sidney had from Meres small Latine and Lesse Greeke rather than the great writers that were due her as the author Shakespeare. Jonson ensures the point is not lost by calling forth the many that Meres lists as the greatest of Greece and Rome, “As these Tragicke Poets flourished in Greece, Aeschylus, Euripedes, Sophocles … and these among the Latines, Accius, Seneca (he of Cordova)” and, “for Comedy among the Greeks are these, Menander, Aristophanes, … and among the Latines, Plautus, Terence,”^[8] … and compares to Shakespeare among other English writers. Mary Sidney is not included in those lists, not even the ones that highlight translations, for which she had already acquired a reputation. Instead, she is treated separately in the brief section of great and noble patrons along with Queen Elizabeth and King James of Scotland. The table above highlights all of the writers mentioned by Jonson, as well as all who have been proffered as author of Shakespeare’s works and the classical comparisons offered by Meres. For nearly all, Meres construction of lengthy lists results in many names associated with each early modern writer; for Shakespeare there are 58. No other significant author is compared with only two, let alone two that could be characterized as small Latin and less Greek. There is simply no other match for Small Latine and Lesse Greeke in Meres; it uniquely identifies Mary Sidney.

In his survey of renaissance literary criticism published in 1908, J.E. Spingarn did find another match for Jonson’s line^[9]. In d’Arte Poetica (1564), Antonio Minturno called out certain writers who had “little latin and less Greek” and, as a consequence, thought Seneca a superior tragedian to Euripides and Sophocles. That Minturno by this intended Scaliger and Cinthio, the most prominent writers to profess this view and among the most respected scholars of sixteenth century Europe^[10] puts a very different cast on the meaning than the limitations of the grade school education attributed to William of Stratford.  The substance of Minturno’s comment fits Sidney as well. As we have already seen, Scaliger was the primary source for Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, with which Jonson aligned Shakespeare in the first part of his poem. In addition Mary Sidney was specifically identified with the effort to incorporate Senecan tragedy into the English stage. Mary Sidney was the first English woman to publish a play under her own name, a translation of Robert Garnier’s Antoine. The French Garnier, a friend of her brother Philip, used Senecan style drama to offer veiled political commentary on the fraught and religiously charged environment of late sixteenth century Europe. His Antoine was a closet drama, intended for informal presentation in homes of aristocrats rather than for the public stage. Mary’s translation, printed in 1595, is considered a primary source for Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra. Sidney’s encouragement of Thomas Kid^[11] and Samuel Daniel^[12] to follow her lead with their own translations from Garnier made Sidney the leading advocate of Senecan closet drama in the 1590s. It is not unlikely that Jonson would have connected the Minturno line with Sidney and found the Meres pairing a serendipitous opportunity for clever wordplay.

It is also possible that Meres himself had Minturno in mind, and there is more to the Sidney epigram than simply comparing her to the most famous female patron and poet of antiquity. Octavia was not generally famous for her patronage of poets. The generous gift to Virgil was for memorializing her son Marcellus in the passage Virgil read from the Aeneid at the boy’s funeral. In his Consolation for Marcia, Seneca contrasted the excessive grief of Octavia with the stoicism of Augustus’ wife Livia facing the death of her son, Drusus^[13]. Sidney famously secluded herself for two years after both her parents and brother died within a few months in 1586. After she returned to the court she edited, finished and published Philips writings, and patronized writers who wrote in his memory. In his dedication to his Senecan closet drama Cleopatra, written in the style of Garnier and dedicated to the Countess as a sequel to Antonie, Samuel Daniel recognized Mary’s efforts to continue her brother’s defense of Poesy against the Puritan opposition,

It is clear that Daniel is referencing a passage in which Philip quotes Joseph Caesar Scaliger, “Qua authoritate barbari quidam atq; hispidi abuti velint ad poetas e rep. Exigendos.” (There are some barbarians who would exile poets from the republic on the authority of Plato). Sidney wrote the Defence of Poesy in response to Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse, an attack on the public stage, and its players. Jonson references the same metaphor in the folio eulogy, “Looke how the fathers face lives in his issue, even so, the race of Shakespeares minde, and manners brightly shines in his well toned, and true-filed lines: in each of which, he seemes to shake a Lance, as brandish't at the eyes of Ignorance.”

The latter referent for Sidney in Meres also offers a connection to Shakespeare. Sappho was well known to Elizabethans, but mainly through the references of other writers who extol her and her works. Antipater of Sidon in the second century BCE imagines Mnemosyne’s surprise that “the mortals have a tenth Muse” in the figure of Sappho (Μναμοσύναν ἕλε θάμβος, ὅτ’ ἔκλυε τᾶς μελιφώνου / Σαπφοῦς, μὴ δεκάταν Μοῦσαν ἔχουσι βροτοί, Anthalogia Palatina 9.66)^[14]. Meres’ Latin translation of the original Greek substitutes sweetness for surprise. We don’t have to look far for a matching reference. Only a few lines earlier Meres writes,

As the soule of Euphorbus was thought to liue in Pythagoras: so the sweete wittie soule of Ouid liues in mellifluous & honytongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends, &c. As Epius Stolo said, that the Muses would speake with Plautus tongue, if they would speak Latin: so I say that the Muses would speak with Shakespeares fine filed phrase, if they would speake English.

Moreover, one of the few fragments of Sappho’s poetry that was available to Elizabethan readers was her lamentation of Aphrodite for Adonis^[15]. Is Meres intimating that Mary Sidney is the English Muse speaking with Shakespeare’s honeyed tongue?

Shakespeare Responds to Meres: Henry IV part 2

In his 2015 book, Shakespeare’s Verbal Art,^[16] William Bellamy identifies Act 2, scene 4 of Henry IV part 1 as an extended response to Meres’ characterization of Shakespeare. The Folger summary of the scene^[17] simply notes that “At a tavern in Eastcheap, Prince Hal and Poins amuse themselves by tormenting a young waiter while waiting for Falstaff to return.” The waiter (or drawer, as Shakespeare calls him, a tapster’s assistant or barkeep) is named Francis and Prince Hal indulges in extended wordplay around a “pennyworth of sugar, clapped even now into my hand by an under-skinker, one that never spake other English in his life than “Eight shillings and sixpence” and “You are welcome,” with this shrill addition, “Anon, anon, sir!  Score a pint of bastard in the Half-Moon,” or so.” Hal commands his companion Ned Poins, “But, Ned, to drive away the time till Falstaff come, I prithee, do thou stand in some by-room, while I question my puny drawer to what end he gave me the sugar; and do thou never leave calling “Francis,” that his tale to me may be nothing but “Anon.”

Prince. Nay but harke you Frances, for the sugar thou gauest me, twas a peniworth, wast not?

Francis. O Lord, I would it had bin two.

Prince. I will giue thee for it a thousand pound, aske me when thou wilt, and thou shalt haue it,^[18]

The rhyming connections to Meres (beers is implied by drawer and Hal asks how many yeeres his indenture will run) and the sugared compliments he offers to both Shakespeare and Sidney could make this a simple jibe in return for a backhanded compliment, but the repetition of “anon” and the teasing offer of a thousand pounds with its echo of Octavia’s gift to Virgil create an intertextual identification in precisely the same way as Jonson does a quarter century later. Poins suggests as much a few lines later.

Poins. As merry as crickets, my lad. But hark ye; what cunning match have you made with this jest of the drawer?  Come, what’s the issue?^[19]

Nature’s Family

Meres provides Jonson one more opportunity to point to Mary Sidney, which accounts for the intervening lines that encompass “not for an Age but for all time” and conclude with other writers “Not of Nature’s family”.

Here the distinctive lines are “Nature her selfe was proud of his designes, And joy'd to weare the dressing of his lines! Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit.” Jonson wants us to find the reference to verse as clothing in Meres. There is one passage that fits, immediately preceding the section of comparisons, “As a long gowne maketh not an Advocate, although a gowne be a fit ornament for him: so riming nor versing maketh a Poet, albeit the Senate of Poets hath chosen verse as their fittest rayment; but it is y^t faining notable images of vertues, vices, or what else, with that delightfull teaching, which must bee the right describing note to knowe a Poet by.” which Meres ascribes to “Sir Philip Sidney in his Apology for Poetry”.

Shakespeare’s Pronouns

Notice Jonson’s change of pronouns, from second person familiar thee to third person, he. “He” is Philip Sidney, and the author, Mary (thee), was “Sidney’s sister” in the elegy which graces her tomb^[20]. The distinction was not lost on Michael Drayton. In his Letter to Henry Reynolds, Esq. Drayton characterized all the important English writers up to his time. All but one are referred to with the third person masculine he and his; Shakespeare alone is addressed with the non-gendered thou and thy.^[21]

For all the praise heaped upon Mary Sidney, it was her brother who was owed homage by “all scenes of Europe,” a debt paid with Sonnets from authors across the continent after his heroic death fighting the Spanish at Zutphen.  In the literary allusions of the period, he was Phoebus and Mary Pallas, the Apollo and spear shaking Minerva of their literary world. Thomas Nashe’s introduction to Philip’s Astrophil and Stella provides but one example to which Jonson could refer:

Apollo hath resigned his Iuory Harp vnto Astrophel, & he, like Mercury, must lull you a sleep with his musicke. . . fayre sister of Phœbus, and eloquent secretary to the Muses, most rare Countesse of Pembroke, thou art not to be omitted, whom Artes doe adore as a second Minerua, and our Poets extoll as the Patronesse of their inuention; for in thee the Lesbian Sappho with her lirick Harpe is disgraced, and the Laurel Garlande which thy Brother so brauely aduaunst on his Launce is still kept greene in the Temple of Pallas.^[22].

In Nashe’s dedication Philip appears as both Mercury and Phoebus and Mary as Pallas Athena, the Spearshaking patron of warriors and poets who disgraces “Lesbian Sappho.” In To Penshurst, Jonson himself proclaims Philip’s “great birth where all the Muses met,” echoing the verses contributed by his mentor William Camden to the Oxford Memorial volume for Sidney published a year after Philip’s death. Camden’s Latin verse translated provides, “Nature’s genius admired herself in Sidney,” “when you were alive the Muses hoped to live,” and concludes, “Our Britain is the glory and jewel of the world, but Sidney was the jewel of Britain.”

The extended Sidney family, Robert, the Earl of Leicester, his daughter Mary Sidney Wroth, Robert’s nephew William Herbert Earl of Pembroke and Lord Chamberlain, and Robert’s sister and William’s mother Mary Sidney Herbert were key patrons and friends throughout Jonson’s life. He lauded them as subjects of some of his greatest poetry and dedicated to them even more of his work. The writers Meres’ cites as the best of ancient Rome and Greece are antiquated and deserted in comparison to Mary and her family amongst whom Jonson was proud to claim a place.

   Once again we can examine the text for the embedded anagrams Jonson uses to reveal his intertextual references. He signals the covert naming of the author with the phrase Thou art in the text. Thou art leads to the anagram Mary (coincident with the overt Monument without a tomb), and in the next line and art precedes the anagram Sidney. Later, Jonson confirms the overt allusions to Meres with anagrams, five times naming Fr. Meres as source for the text (and rhyming his name for good measure). There is a sixth Meres anagram in the following section.

Thou art a [Moniment, without a tombe,                    [Mary]
And art alive [still, while thy] Booke doth live,           [Sidney]
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.

That I not mixe thee so, my braine excuses ;
I meane with great, but disproportion'd Muses :
[For, if I thought my judgement were of yeeres],       [Fr Meres]
I should commit thee surely with thy peeres,
And tell, how farre thou dist our Lily out-shine,
Or sporting Kid or Marlowes mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latine, and lesse Greeke,
[From thence to honour thee, I would not seeke        [Fr Meres]
For names]; but call forth thund'ring Aeschilus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to vs,
Paccuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To life againe, to heare thy Buskin tread,
And shake a stage: Or, when thy sockes were on,
Leave thee alone, for the comparison
Of all, that insolent Greece, or haughtie Rome
Sent forth, or since did [from their ashes] come.         [Fr Meres]

Tri'umph, my Britain, thou hast one to show

To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.

He was not of an age but [for all time!                         [Fr Meres]

And all the Muses] still were in their prime,

When, like Apollo, he came [forth to warm                 [Fr Meres]

Our ears], or like a Mercury to charm!

Nature her selfe was proud of his designes,
And joy'd to weare the dressing of his lines!
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,
As, since, she will vouchsafe no other Wit.
The merry Greeke, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not
please; But antiquated, and deserted lye
As they were not of Natures family.

Jonson’s choice of Meres and these specific passages has particular relevance to both Sidney and Shakespeare. Taken together these three passages uniquely identify the author as the “subject of all verse,” the learned Countess of Pembroke, Mary Sidney Herbert, Sidney’s sister. Pembroke’s mother, just as she is identified on the sable marble which marks her tomb in Salisbury Cathedral on the bank of the Wiltshire Avon near her Wilton home. Meres’ Palladis Tamia was the first printed acknowledgement that William Shakespeare was responsible for the plays previously attributed only to the company that performed them (Originally Pembroke’s Men, later, Sussex’, Derby’s, or the Lord Chamberlain’s as their patronage evolved). Shakespeare responded just months later with a scene in Henry IV, the second play published bearing the name. The connections revealed in both the Jonson and Shakespeare references suggest that Meres himself intended readers to make the connection between Shakespeare and Sidney, which itself has important implications for our understanding of relationships between early modern writers and their readers.

In line 24 of his poem Jonson says “we have wits to read and praise to give.” Having read Wits Treasury we will next see Jonson reference praise not for Shakespeare, but for Mary Sidney Herbert, drawn from published dedications by Christopher Marlow, Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton in the final section of the poem.

Continue reading: Sweet Swan of Avon

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[1] daxelrod, “The Shakespeare First Folio (Folger Copy No. 68),” Text, December 20, 2015, https://www.folger.edu/the-shakespeare-first-folio-folger-copy-no-68.

[2] Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio (Newark : University of Delaware Press ; London ; Cranbury, NJ : Associated University Presses, 1991), http://archive.org/details/benjonsons1616fo0000unse.

[3] Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia Wits Treasury Being the Second Part of Wits Common Wealth. By Francis Meres Maister of Artes of Both Vniuersities., 2011, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A68463.0001.001.

[4] mcarafano, “Publishing Shakespeare,” Text, December 15, 2014, https://www.folger.edu/publishing-shakespeare.

[5] Meres, Palladis Tamia Wits Treasury Being the Second Part of Wits Common Wealth. By Francis Meres Maister of Artes of Both Vniuersities., 283.

[6] TW Baldwin, William Shakespeare"s Small Latin and Lesse Greek (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944).

[7] Meres, Palladis Tamia Wits Treasury Being the Second Part of Wits Common Wealth. By Francis Meres Maister of Artes of Both Vniuersities., 284.

[8] Meres, Palladis Tamia Wits Treasury Being the Second Part of Wits Common Wealth. By Francis Meres Maister of Artes of Both Vniuersities.

[9] J. E. Spingarn, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (Columbia University Press, 1908), https://doi.org/10.7312/spin90096.

[10] Meres lists Scaliger as one of two noteworthy literary critics.

[11] “Cornelia,” accessed January 24, 2023, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A01500.0001.001?view=toc.

[12] The Tragedy of Cleopatra in John Pitcher, Samuel Daniel, vol. 1 (Oxford University Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.88.

[13] Seneca, “Of Consolation: To Marcia” (n.d.), Wikisource.

[14]“In_the_name_of_sappho_-_reception_of_sappho_and_her_influence_on_the_female_voice_in_hellenistic_epigram.Pdf,” accessed September 7, 2022, https://www.ed.ac.uk/files/atoms/files/in_the_name_of_sappho_-_reception_of_sappho_and_her_influence_on_the_female_voice_in_hellenistic_epigram.pdf.

[15] R.J.H. Matthews, “The Lament For Adonis : Questions Of Authorship,” Antichthon 24 (1990): 32–52, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0066477400000526.

[16] William Bellamy, Shakespeare’s Verbal Art (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016).

[17] “Henry IV, Part 1, Act 2, Scene 4 | The Folger SHAKESPEARE,” February 7, 2019, https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/henry-iv-part-1/act-2-scene-4/.

[18] “Henry IV, Part 1 (Quarto 1, 1598) :: Internet Shakespeare Editions,” accessed January 24, 2023, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/1H4_Q1/scene/2.4/index.html.

[19] Ibid.

[20] “Mary Sidney Herbert (1561-1621) - Find a Grave...,” accessed January 24, 2023, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/16732373/mary-herbert. The current stone itself is a modern addition. The elegy appears in manuscript in Jonson’s papers and was attributed to him until an early 20^th century monograph awarded it to William Browne, primarily on the basis that Jonson was not close to Mary Sidney and her family, a judgement which probably warrants reexamination.

[21] “King’s Collections : Exhibitions & Conferences : Michael Drayton on Shakespeare,” accessed January 24, 2023, https://kingscollections.org/exhibitions/specialcollections/the-very-age-and-body-of-the-time-shakespeares-world/what-revels-are-at-hand-shakespeares-literary-contemporaries/michael-drayton-on-shakespeare.

[22] “Front Matter. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586). Astrophel and Stella. Seccombe and Arber, Comps. 1904. Elizabethan Sonnets,” accessed January 24, 2023, https://www.bartleby.com/358/1.html.

In the first couplet, To draw no envy (Shakespeare) on thy name, Am I thus ample to thy book and fame; Jonson establishes a tone for the poem, both indulging in slippery wordplay and making a joke at his own expense. Barbara DeStefano notes that “Epideictic praise during the Renaissance had fallen into disrepute because it had been used so often as a means for shameless flattery, and poetry itself was often considered a "gentlemen's toy”[1]. In promising that he is sufficient to draw no envy on his subject Jonson is explicitly promising he will not offer excessive flattery. It is conventional on these occasions to plead unworthiness for the task, an expression of Renaissance sprezzatura that required courtiers to dismiss their efforts however labored as trifles of no great moment, made by unworthy hands. Jonson subverts that norm, claiming that he is sufficient (ample), though perhaps only for the diminished task he has set. He is also making fun of his own weight. An athletic man in his youth, Jonson had grown with his success and access to the well-furnished boards of his noble patrons.

That Jonson invokes envy and fame in the first line of a poem acknowledging that a writer’s work will enshrine them in eternal memory strongly suggests Ovid’s elegy 15 from Book 1 of his Amores. Christopher Marlowe translated the Amores in what is likely his earliest published work. Jonson included a slightly different translation of elegy 15 in its entirety as a monologue by Ovid in the first act of Poetaster, his entry in the 1601 War of the Poets with Marston and Dekker. Appropriately it contains the line Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua, (Let base conceited wits admire vilde things, Faire Phoebus leade me to the Muses springs.), which appears as the motto on the title page of Venus and Adonis, the work that introduced the name Shakespeare to the literary world of London.

Ovid’s poem incorporates the flattery of bauds and whores (as subjects of the Greek writer of Comedies Menander, whom Ovid claims will live on as long as men continue the foibles he portrays) and so offers an explanation for some of Jonson’s more perplexing lines. Indeed, it is immediately apparent that the elegy provides a pattern that Jonson follows closely in his own elegy, first an apology for poetry, then a recognition of classical authors and finally a claim for immortality and stellafication through verse.

If the line does constitute a reference to Venus and Adonis, however tenuous, it highlights a curious feature of Jonson’s poem. There are no direct references to any of the plays or poems written by Shakespeare. In a few lines Francis Meres names the narrative poems, the unpublished sonnets and eight plays mostly previously unconnected to Shakespeare. In the volume that preserves the plays for posterity, Jonson names not one. There is not even a side mention of the Danish Prince, or roguish Falstaff to provide an oblique reference to the timeless characters that keep Shakespeare’s plays on theatre stages to this day.

A more prosaic meaning of the first line which connects it to earlier elements in the folio might be found by comparing the engraving of Shakespeare made for the folio by Martin Droeshout with the engraving done of Mary Sidney in 1618 by Simon de Passe.

The First Folio title page engraving is almost unique in period for being a simple image of the man, with none of the embellishments that typically surround such portraits.

Mary Sidney’s image is surrounded with the symbols of a writer, she holds a book, is crowned with laurel wreaths and bracketed by her signature swan feather quills. Although Jonson’s 1616 folio did not include a portrait in the preface materials, the title page had all the architectural ornament suitable to a serious work, and he subsequently commissioned a portrait engraving similar to Sidney’s which was often added by owners to his volume. Most significant for Jonson’s poem is the oval border around the portrait image which reads Nobliss^ma et Virtiss^ma dona Maria Sid… Henrici Comite Pembroc. Coniut (Most noble and virtuous Mary Sidney wife of Henry, Earl of Pembroke). De Passe has literally drawn NV (Nobliss^ma et Virtiss^ma ) on Sidney’s name (dona Maria etc.) while the familiar Droeshout portrait is without N.V. (or any of the other customary text or ornament).

The next couplet also offers continuity with previous preface material. “While I confesse thy writings to be such, As neither Man, nor Muse, can praise too much. Tis true, and all men's suffrage.” In the letter To the Great Variety of Readers, ostensibly by the players who organized the folio, but almost certainly written by Jonson, there is an exhortation to buy the book which borrows directly from Jonson’s Bartholomew Faire, “From the most able, to him that can but spell: there you are number'd. We had rather you were weighed; especially, when the fate of all bookes depends upon your capacities and not of your heads alone, but of your purses.” Jonson had previously lamented that votes in Parliament were numbered, not weighed. In both he draws on Aristotle’s Poetics, which argues that drama must have weight or consequence which derives from writing about the affairs of monarchs and gods. Both also invoke Scaliger’s view that the poet was almost like another God, that set about the creation of Active worlds in the same way that God created the universe, ‘by measure and number and weight’ an expression taken from the biblical Wisdom of Solomon.[3]

Once again there is a painfully literal reading which might reveal the nature of Jonson’s role in producing the folio. If Mary Sidney had begun the process of publishing the folio under her own name, her sons were faced with the decision about whether to continue after her death in light of the political situation surrounding the Spanish match and the scandal attending the release of Urania (see part 6 of this series). Is Jonson revealing that they took a vote (all men’s suffrage) and decided to proceed with publication but obscure Mary’s authorship? Might his preference to grant Mary credit have won if they had been weighed and not counted, another fat joke? The subsequent lines certainly support that reading, he literally offers the view that praising the Matron could damage her reputation and “ruine thine” (her children?). At the very least these lines underscore the risk of ignorant readers drawing mistaken conclusions if they fail to read with understanding

Whatever the constraints facing Jonson they do not prevent him from proffering effusive praise, “I, therefore will begin. Soule of the Age! The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage!”

He follows with:

This has long been viewed as a response to an elegy attributed to William Basse which called for Chaucer, Spenser and Beaumont to move over to make room for Shakespeare in Poet’s corner of Westminster Abbey.

On Mr Wm Shakespeare

Renowned Spencer, lye a thought more nye
To learned Chaucer, & rare Beaumont lye
A little neerer Spenser to make roome
For Shakespeare in your threefold fowrefold Tombe
To lodge all fowre in one bed make a shift
Vntill Doomesdaye, for hardly will a fift
Betwixt yis day & yat by Fate be slayne
ffor whom your Curtaines may be drawn againe.
If your precedency in death doth barre
A fourth place in your sacred sepulcher,
Vnder this carued marble of thine owne
Sleepe rare Tragœdian, Shakespeare sleep alone
Thy vnmolested peace, vnshared Caue
Possesse as Lord not Tenant of thy Graue
That vnto us and others it may be
Honor hereafter to be layde by thee.
                                              Wm Basse

Jonson’s rejection of the suggestion in the eulogy is generally accepted as a response to Basse and therefore dates the elegy before publication of the Folio in November,1623, a supposition now confirmed by Jonson’s anagrams. While the precise date of composition is unknown, the poem circulated in manuscript for some years before appearing in print in 1633, mistakenly attributed to John Donne[4]. In total we have extant 35 manuscript versions and 5 printed in various collections from the period[5]. None of the printed editions were likely approved by Basse and the lone manuscript which had been identified as autograph was assigned to William Brown in the most recent review. The various sources show considerable variation in spelling and even in wording which makes it difficult to interpret the author’s intent and fruitless to look to anagrams for reliable guidance. One printed version (in the 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s Poems) and at least four manuscripts include as subtitle “who died in April 1616.” Another identifies Shakespeare as native to Stratford. However, it is not evident that Basse himself made a connection between the author and the man from Stratford. Other than the elegy there is no known relationship or connection between Basse and Shakespeare.  Basse’s poem does not explicitly reference Stratford or the Trinity Church Monument and mischaracterizes Shakespeare’s burial site as a cave beneath carved marble instead of the ordinary grave some distance from the monument of carved limestone.

The word carved is most often varied across copies. Variants include uncarved, curved, curled, sacred and sable. The last is intriguing. Mary Sidney is entombed in Salisbury Cathedral beneath a sable marble tablet inscribed with a poem variously attributed to Ben Jonson and more recently to Basse’s friend William Browne. The two elegies share a central conceit: Basse, that Poets’ Corner need provide only one more space, “Vntill Doomesdaye, for hardly will a fift Betwixt yis day & yat by Fate be slayne ffor whom your Curtaines may be drawn againe” and Browne, “Death, ere thou hast slain another Fair and learned and good as she, Time shall throw a dart at thee.” While Basse did not have a documented relationship with Shakespeare, Mary Sidney Herbert is a central figure in his writing. Basse’s most important work is a pastoral modeled on Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar, consisting of poems for the days of the week, each associated with a cardinal virtue. Three of the seven take as their subject Mary Sidney.  Basse recognizes her as a patron in his pastoral poem On Gratitude. On Constancy laments the passing of his great supporters, Sidney and the Viscount Wenman, in whose employ he served his entire adult life. Another poem, On Temperance, constructed as a lover’s complaint, tells of Mary Sidney’s trip to Europe in 1616. In that poem he speaks of a lambe, that In a false skin now suckes a lambeles mother, Is not to us, (though to his nurse), unknowne By his loose robe from his dead foster-brother. While it is conceivable that Basse is blinde to the author’s identity it is perhaps more likely that his elegy is responding to the death of Mary Sidney and advocating for the publication of her works under her own name.

Parsing the text for the anagrams Jonson established in the Forest supports this interpretation. The first couplet contains compliant anagrams for Naso and Amores reinforcing the identification of Elegy 15 as the critical and structural foundation of the poem. Jonson makes clear he is answering Basse by covertly incorporating his name at least five times in the portion of the poem leading to the overt reference to the elegy.  Although he uses both blinde and Bawd or whore as forma for Basse anagrams it is not clear whether these were intended to disparage Basse or directed at others who might innocently or maliciously misconstrue his meaning. The overt text suggests that ignorant and misled individuals might go astray in their attempts to honor Shakespeare. Or [blinde] Affection, which doth ne're advance the truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance. Jonson’s anagrams for Constancy, Temperance and Gratitude within the context of Basse’s poetry make clear the Sidney connection.[6]

To draw [no] envy (Shakespeare) on thy name,            [Naso]
[Am I thus] ample to thy [Booke], and Fame;              [Amores]          [Basse]
While I [confesse thy] writings to be such,                  [Constancy]
As neither Man, nor Muse, can praise too much.
[Tis true, and all men's suffrage]. But these ways         [Temperance]
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise;
For seeliest Ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but eccho's right;
Or [blinde] Affection, which doth ne're advance         [Basse]
The truth, but [gropes, and urgeth all by chance];        [Gratitude]
Or crafty Malice, might pretend this praise,
And thine to ruine, where it seem'd to raise.
These are, as some infamous [Baud, or Whore],          [Basse]
Should [praise a] Matron. What could hurt her more? [Paemenarcha]
But thou art [proofe a]gainst them, and indeed           [Pandora]
Above th' ill fortune of them, or the need.
I, therefore [will begin. Soule] of the Age!                   [Will Basse]
The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage!
My Shakespeare, rise; I [will not lodge thee] by           [William Basse]
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye
A little further, to make thee a roome :
Thou art a [Moniment, without a tombe,                    [Mary]
And art alive [still, while thy] Booke doth live,           [Sidney]
And we have wits to read, and praise to give.

Having warned against misidentifying the author, Jonson concludes by covertly providing her true identity. He signals the covert naming with the phrase Thou art in the text. Thou art proof against them introduces the anagram Pandora, the all-gifted goddess whose name often stood for Sidney in published dedications and poems, including those of Christopher Marlowe and Michael Drayton that will be referenced later (Pandora is reinforced overtly in the next line …and the ill fortune of them). A few lines later Thou art leads to the anagram Mary (coincident with the overt Monument without a tomb), and in the next line and art precedes the anagram Sidney.

Whatever confusion may have been generated, Jonson assures the author, (thou) art alive still, while thy Booke doth live, And we have wits to read, and praise to give. Jonson’s poem will reveal the author’s identity if we have wits to read, specifically, Francis Meres’ Palladis Tamia: Wits treasury being the second part of Wits common wealth[7] to decode his message. Both the word play on Wits and the lists of comparisons among writers would have brought Meres to mind for contemporary readers.

Continue Reading: Wits to Read, Francis Meres and Shakespeare’s Small Latin

[1] Barbara L DeStefano, “Ben Jonson’s Eulogy on Shakespeare: Native Maker and the Triumph of English,” 2023, 233.

[2] John Frederick Nims, Ovid’s Metamorphoses : The Arthur Golding Translation of 1567, ed. John Nims (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000).

[3] Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry, 1st edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 16.

[4] “Manuscript Copy of William Basse’s Elegy on William Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Documented, accessed August 1, 2022, https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/manuscript-copy-william-basses-elegy-william-shakespeare.

[5] Brandon S. Centerwall, “Who Wrote William Basse’s ‘Elegy on Shakespeare’?: Rediscovering a Poem Lost from the Donne Canon,” in Shakespeare Survey: Volume 59: Editing Shakespeare, ed. Peter Holland, vol. 59, Shakespeare Survey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 267–84, https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521868386.022.

[6] Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (Oxford University Press, 1990), 195.

[7] Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia Wits Treasury Being the Second Part of Wits Common Wealth. By Francis Meres Maister of Artes of Both Vniuersities., 2011, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A68463.0001.001.

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“Ben Jonson is the person who tells us most about Shakespeare. Ben Jonson was a colleague of Shakespeare, in the sense that some of his plays were put on by Shakespeare’s company, or one of them was, and he clearly, he writes very intimately about Shakespeare, he writes sometimes critically about Shakespeare, but he also writes that he loved him this side idolatry, he writes the first full critical appreciation of Shakespeare, the Ben Jonson elegy in the First Folioʼs a very important piece of criticism, the finest piece of Shakespeare criticism before Dryden, later in the seventeenth century.”

Sir Stanley Wells, president emeritus Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

This chapter begins the examination of Jonson’s contributions to Shakespeare’s First Folio as literary works, which must be interpreted as literary texts, with understanding as Jonson requests. In so doing I will follow the precepts established in Reading with Understanding: the Hermeneutic Circle. In particular I will endeavour to establish the literary sources that Jonson references explicitly and by implication, then consider what contribution to his overall project can be gotten by reading them intertextually, that is by reading the texts together with Jonson’s poem to find a synthetic meaning which is apparent from combining the two. Wells tells us that Jonson’s poem performs two functions, one to provide a critical overview of Shakespeare, the other to provide insight into the author’s identity and biography. I will therefore focus on these two aspects when considering potential allusive content in the poem. For critical value I will look for potential references to the critical theory followed and advanced by Jonson, Shakespeare and their contemporaries. With respect to biography, I will consider historically accepted references to William of Stratford, (Sweet Swan of Avon is considered the most important evidence linking Shakespeare to Stratford) but will be open to materials that connect the poem to Mary Sidney Herbert, following the apparent hint in Jonson’s To Penshurst that she is linked to the author.

When the Shakespeare folio finally reached the public in November 1623, it was prefaced with a curious portrait of the author, a poem addressed To the Reader, which faced the portrait, and a memorial poem both signed by Ben Jonson, and two letters purportedly written by Shakespeare’s fellow actors Hemmings and Condell. Modern scholars believe it is all the work of Jonson, working at the behest of the Herbert brothers to whom the volume is dedicated.

It is the memorial poem on which I will focus for the most part. It has the long and somewhat cumbersome title:

The poem consists of 80 lines in rhyming couplets. The first 16 constitute an apology of sorts for the impossibility of properly memorializing the author, citing first the limitations of language and poetic ability, then the inevitability that readers will misconstrue and twist his words as if they were the praise of a baud or whore. In line 17 he reverses course, “I will begin,” and promises the writer, “thou art alive still while thy book doth live and we have wits to read and praise to give. This makes the poem a palinode, in which a rhetorical false start sets up the body of the work. In the next section Jonson makes a series of comparisons to ancient and contemporary writers claiming that Shakespeare outshines them all as a writer of both tragic and comedic drama. Finally Jonson addresses the source of Shakespeare’s greatness finding both nature (his in borne qualities) and art (the craft and labor of writing) which have delighted Shakespeare’s royal patrons and earned a place as a constellation in the heavens, while those left behind can only mourn their loss.

Many readers have noted the concentration of pronouns in the poem. Even in the title it is my beloved and what he has left us. For most of the poem Jonson addresses the author with the second person familiar thee and thy. Thou art alive still while thy book doth live… However, half way through he switches to third person, He was not of an age but for all time! before returning the thee and thou at the end, I see thee advanced as a constellation.

Having considered the structure of the poem I turn to potential sources and references. The palinode form has a widely known classical exemplar in Plato’s Phaedrus. Phaedrus was central to Philip Sidney’s reclaiming Plato in the name of poets in his Defence of Poesy, the most important work of critical theory of the English Renaissance. Sidney in turn got the core of his idea from Julius Caesar Scaliger who advanced the idea of poet as maker from the Greek word poesis, a view echoed by Jonson’s favorite classical writer Horace in his Ars Poetica and used in the last third of Jonson’s elegy. The dangers of writing being misinterpreted to evil ends was commonplace in period, particularly associated with the Latin poet Ovid. In the preface to his translation of Metamorphosis Arthur Golding warns:

It was these latter from whom Sidney defended poesy, quoting Scaliger, “Qua authoritate barbari quidam atq; hispidi abuti velint ad poetas e rep. Exigendos.” (There are some barbarians who would exile poets from the republic on the authority of Plato). Jonson’s first line with its mentions of envy and fame evokes the 15^th elegy of Book 1 of Ovid’s Amores, which provided the motto for Venus and Adonis, and in a translation by Marlow, appeared in the first act of Jonson’s Poetaster. Ovids argument for immortality through poetry provides the framework for the entire poem.

With, “I therefore will begin. Soul of the age! The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!” Jonson offers perhaps the most famous description of Shakespeare and certainly what Wells refers to when he says Jonson provides the “finest bit of Shakespeare criticism before Dryden.”

Jonson next dismisses the suggestion that Shakespeare be buried in Westminster, with Chaucer, Spenser and Beaumont, apparently in response to an elegy for Shakespeare written by William Basse. This is another point Stratfordians claim as proof for the traditional identification for it seems to establish that the Basse elegy was written before the folio and therefore constitutes a contemporaneous reaction to the author’s death.

Jonson follows the prophetic promise (Thou) “art alive still while thy book doth live and we have wits to read and praise to give.” with lists of classical and contemporary writers who cannot compare with Shakespeare. The phrase “wits to read” and lists of authors would immediately bring to mind Francis Meres’ Palladis Tamia, a Treasury of Wit (1598). Meres’s commonplace book identified Shakespeare as the author of at least eight plays for the stage at a time when the name Shakespeare had only appeared in connection with the narrative poems. Only after Meres was Shakespeare identified as author on quarto publications of plays. In considering Meres we will look to the other important contemporary literary critics. Foremost of these are Sidney and Scaliger, already mentioned. Others who provided lists of this type that influenced Meres include Texor (Officina), Minturno (Arte Poetica) and Puttenham (Art of Poesy).  This section also contains what is considered Jonson’s slight to Shakespeare, “Though thou hadst small Latin and lesse Greek”. This phrase has led some academics to believe that Shakespeare had little education beyond what he might have received in Stratford’s grammar school and thus to dismiss most classical references in the works, while others see it only as a measure of Jonson’s conceit and classicism and read it as true only in comparison to Jonson itself. The academy is slowly accepting that Shakespeare had a great command of classical sources and forms and so escaping the trap of this curious phrase.  

As previously mentioned, the final section draws heavily on Horace’s Ars Poetica for its discussion of the proper role and method of the poet. We have two extent translations of the work by Jonson, an annotated version reputedly perished in the desk fire that inspired his Execration upon Vulcan. It is also the source of instructions for the anagrams William Bellamy claims Jonson uses to annotate his works. I will examine the poem for anagrams that might shed light on Jonson’s intentions. Many of the final lines have a peculiar resonance with published dedications to the Countess of Pembroke, I will consider those as well, particularly the Samuel Daniel sonnet in which he pledges But Avon, poor in fame, and poor in waters, Shall have my song, where Delia hath her seat.

Continue Reading: Bauds, Whores and William Basse

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If Ben Jonson really intended readers to discover that Mary Sidney was the virtuous parent of the plays of William Shakespeare whose noble parts teach the ‘mysteries of manners armes and arts’, as the Horacian anagrams in the poem suggest, we would expect to find a confirmation in the preface materials of the Shakespeare First Folio, which are believed to be almost entirely the work of Jonson. We will. But first, it will be helpful to review the circumstances surrounding Jonson and the Sidney/Herbert families leading up to the production of the folio.

When Jonson published his complete works in 1616, Robert Sidney and his Herbert nephews were in the ascendancy in English politics. Out of favour with the crown during the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, their fortunes had improved with James. Mary Sidney’s younger son, Philip Herbert, was one of the Scottish king’s first favourites, gaining the Earldom of Montgomery upon his marriage to Susan de Vere as his reward. His brother William, heir to the Pembroke title, emerged from his disreputable youth as a leader of Parliament, and married a Talbot heiress. Robert Sidney, driven near to bankruptcy as Governor of Flushing in the Netherlands under Elizabeth, was raised to Baron on the accension of James and appointed Chamberlain of the Queen’s household. In 1605 he was named Viscount Lisle and in 1616 joined Philip and William as a Knight of the Garter. Finally in 1618 he was granted the Earldom of Leicester, his uncle’s title he could not inherit through his mother (Robert was the only surviving legitimate grandson of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland and therefore heir to both Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester). However, through the first decade of James’ rule real power lay with others, first Robert Cecil, son of the great Lord Treasurer who ran the government for Elizabeth, and then royal favourite Robert Carr. When Carr forced an ignominious divorce on the young Earl of Essex (on grounds of being unable to perform marital duties) so that Carr could himself marry Essex’ wife (Francis Howard) and the two then conspired to murder Carr’s secretary in the Tower of London, the scandal left a vacuum William Herbert was perfectly positioned to fill. The brothers promoted an attractive young dance master, George Villiers, to occupy the King’s fickle attention, and in December 1515, the grateful monarch made William Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Household, giving him effective control of the country[1].

Their new prominence was captured by the artists of the period. During 1617-18 several of the members of the extended Sidney-Herbert clan sat for portrait engravings by various artists of the Van de Passe family. Mary’s 1618 portrait by Simon de Passe shows her as an author, holding a book and adorned with laurel leaves. Her collar contains lace monograms of the letters WS in the form of swans. In a 2009 article, Michael Brennan notes “there is no evidence that it was ever included as a standard illustration in a contemporary printed volume.” and speculates that the addition of David’s Psalms, “clearly (but with little regard for verisimilitude) added in black lettering across the top edge of the book” might indicate it was commissioned for a collection of her works and repurposed for a hoped-for edition of the Psalms[2].

The dowager countess had spent much of her time from 1614 to 1616 “shooting pistols, taking tobacco, dancing, singing and playing cards” at Spa in Belgium with her attractive younger physician companion Matthew Lister[3]. She returned late in the decade to build a much-admired country house of her own at Houghton, where she hosted King James in July 1621. Shortly after the king’s visit she moved to a city home on Aldersgate St a few steps from the print shop of William Jaggard, in the north of London. Mary’s niece Mary Sidney Wroth was also in London, arranging for the publication of her prose romance, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, the first known written by an English woman.

On September 25, 1621, Mary Sidney died in her London home, a victim of smallpox. She was a month shy of her 60^th birthday[4]. Shortly after, Wroth’s book was released, identifying the author as “niece to the most excellent Lady Mary Countess of Pembroke, late deceased.” Urania caused an instant scandal, suspected of being a roman a clef for gossip of court life, it was immediately condemned by those who believed they were caricatured negatively. Particularly aggrieved was Sir Edward Denny. Denny was a neighbour to the Wroth’s in Essex who believed one tale in particular revealed unflattering details about his family. He responded by circulating a vituperative poem about Wroth in which he called her “a hermaphrodite in show, in deed a monster” condemning her for transgressing the natural limits of her gender and urging her to restrict her efforts to translating psalms like her aunt[5].

Within a month or so of publication Wroth’s book was withdrawn from public sale. Whatever the merits of Denny’s complaint, Wroth risked exposing a secret that threatened her powerful cousin, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. William and the widowed Mary were having an affair which would soon produce two children[6]. William’s political situation had become tenuous; the dance master that he had promoted had advanced beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, and, as the now Duke of Buckingham, was encouraging James’ hopes for a Spanish match for his heir, Charles. James hoped to unite the Protestant and Catholic ruling families of Europe and put an end to the religious strife that had riven the continent since the time of Henry VIII. Still the protestant champion in the mould of his uncle, William led opposition to the marriage plans which gained renewed life with the death of Philip III of Spain. Buckingham and Prince Charles travelled incognito to Spain in Spring of 1623, only to find that the Spanish never seriously considered the marriage and believed the Pope would not grant a dispensation for the Infanta to marry a protestant in any event. By early 1624 they had come to understand that the Spanish viewed them as ludicrous figures. They returned to England hot for war with Spain to salve their embarrassment. Until then however, Pembroke was at risk and could ill afford a scandal involving his family.

Meanwhile, in the fall of 1621, as Mary Wroth was publishing Urania, the scribe for the King’s men, Ralph Crane, produced “fair” copies of five plays, four of them previously unpublished: The Tempest, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure, and a Winter’s Tale. It is believed that he was working from original manuscripts. Although the Folio indicates the plays are published “according to the True Original Copies” only these five were printed from new “fair” texts. A few months after printing started, shortly after Mary Sidney’s death, work on the Folio stopped for months, not resuming until late in 1622, by which time the volume had missed its planned release date (as indicated by a German book fair catalogue)[7].

In the last months of 1623, before the Folio was completed, a fire consumed a portion of Jonson’s office. He lament’s the event in a long, humorous poem, An Execration upon Vulcan published posthumously in 1640. In it he reports the manuscript works lost, which include some of his notebooks, a verse work describing his long walk to Scotland, and an annotated translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica, the work that according to Bellamy holds the instructions for the anagrams Jonson used in his poems about the Sidney family.

When the Shakespeare folio finally reached the public in November 1623, it was prefaced with a curious portrait of the author, a poem addressed To the Reader, which faced the portrait, and a memorial poem for the author, both signed by Ben Jonson. A letter purportedly written by Shakespeare’s fellow actors Hemmings and Condell implored readers to buy the book with phrases from Jonson’s Bartholomew Faire. Their dedicatory epistle (based on Pliny) to the “incomparable paire of brethren” William and Phillip Herbert reminded them they had ‘prosequuted’ both the plays, ‘and their Authour living, with so much favour: we hope, that (they out-living him, and he not having the fate, common with some, to be exequutor to his owne writings) you will use the like indulgence toward them, you have done unto their parent.’ Modern scholars believe it is all the work of Jonson, working at the behest of the Herbert brothers to whom the volume is dedicated.

Continue reading: To the Memory of My Beloved: Ben Jonson on Shakespeare

[1] Adam Nicolson, Quarrel with the King: The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War, Reprint edition (HarperCollins e-books, 2008), 145.

[2] Michael G Brennan, “The Sidney Family and Jacobean Portrait Engravings,” n.d., 15.

[3] Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (Oxford University Press, 1990), 201.

[4] Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix.

[5] Paul Salzman, “Contemporary References in Mary Wroth’s Urania,” The Review of English Studies 29, no. 114 (1978): 179.

[6] Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix, 210.

[7] Edwin Eliott Willoughby, A Printer of Shakespeare (Ardent Media, n.d.).

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The Upstart Crow

In 1592, before any appearance of the name Shakespeare in association with the theatre or literature, a curious pamphlet titled A Groatsworth of Wit Purchased with a Million of Repentance was published in London. Ostensibly the last words of poet and playwright Robert Greene, impoverished by illness and dying in abject poverty, they were conveyed to print by fellow dramatist Henry Chettle. Groatsworth tells the story of a scholar and playwright, Roberto, disinherited by his father, who partners with a courtesan, Lamilia, to swindle his brother of the fortune. Roberto, revealed to be Greene himself, is betrayed and left dying with just a groat (four pence piece) to his name. Groatsworth is remembered because the author concludes with a warning to his fellow playwrights to beware an Upstart Crow who is stealing their works and has cruelly and usuriously trapped Greene in debt without mercy for his illness. The passage was identified as a reference to William Shakespeare by antiquary Thomas Tyrwhitt in 1778 and has since been accepted as a cornerstone of Shakespeare biography. In a 2020 article, Tired with a Peacock’s Tail Peter Bull undertakes a comprehensive review of the evidence[1]  and concludes that there is almost nothing in the characterization of the Crow that was likely true of Shakespeare in 1592 and that the alternative case for Edward (Ned) Alleyn proposed by A.D. Wraight in 1993[2] is much better supported by details in the passage and other references in Greene’s work.

Ned Alleyn was the most famous actor of the time, associated with both the role of Talbot in Henry VI part 1 and Richard in the True Tragedy of Richard of York which appear to be referenced in the passage (both True Tragedy and Henry VI part 3 contain the line Tigers heart in a woman’s hide and both have recently been attributed to Marlowe instead of Shakespeare[3]). As partner and son in law to Philip Henslow, owner of the Rose theatre, Alleyn was also well known for lending to players and writers as well as purchasing their work. Greene was probably the author of Knack to Know a Knave published without attribution except “as performed by Edward Alleyn”, and attacked Alleyn elsewhere by name for acquiring and bombasting plays. Alleyn even has a corvid association through the Magpie symbol on his family pub.

The strongest evidence that Greene means the crow to be Alleyn is from Greene’s Francesco’s Fortunes (1590) where he berates the actor Roscius in terms that echo in Groatsworth:

Why Roscius, art thou proud with Esop’ s Crow, being pranct with the glorie of others feathers? of thy selfe thou canst say nothing, and if the Cobler hath taught thee to say Aue Caesar, disdain not thy tutor, because thou pratest in a Kings chamber: what sentence thou vtterest on the stage, flowes from the censure of our wittes; and what sentence or conceipte of the inuention the people applaud for excellent, that comes from the secrets of our knowledge. I graunt your action, though it be a kind of mechanical labour; yet wel done tis worthie of praise: but you worthlesse, if for so small a toy you waxe proud.

“The Cobler’ was Greene’s name for Christopher Marlowe. Greene’s consistency in applying these epithets is a strong argument that this Crow is the same person referenced in the earlier work but no one would argue for that to be Shakespeare. Quintus Roscius was a Roman actor who was used as a reference in period for the pinnacle of acting. Thomas Nashe referred to Alleyn as Roscius in Pierce Penniless. Given Alleyn’s unrivalled prominence as a leading actor at the time it is unlikely the term would be applied to anyone else.

Apparently, the Crow took umbrage at the attack. Both Chettle[4] and Thomas Nashe, also close to Greene, published denials that they had anything to do with the passage and begging forgiveness for any harm that they might have inadvertently caused. It is hard to imagine how Shakespeare could already have reached a position to ruin Greene and threaten Chettle and Nashe, but Alleyn certainly could have done so given his importance in the London theatre scene.

Are there anagrams in Greene?

Bellamy considers the Crow passage in his book length treatment of anagrams, Shakespeare’s Verbal Art, and finds support for the traditional identification with the young actor Shakespeare. Here is his analysis of the passage[5]:

Yes, trust them not: for there is an vpstart Crow, beautified with our

feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, [Supposes He]              SH

is as well Able to bombast out a blanke verse As the best of you: and being             A

an absolute Iohannes faC totum, is in his ownE conceit the onely [SHakescene]    CE       SH

in A Countrey. O that I might intreatE your raRE witS to be                                             ACE

imploied in more Profitable courses: & let those Apes imitatE your Past                  PE

excellence, and neuER morE acquaint them [with your admired inuentions.            RE WI

I know the best husband of you all] [WIll] neuer proue an Usurer, and the                 WI       LL

kindest of them aLL wiLL neuer seeke you a kind nurse:                                          LL       

While the purported anagrams for Shakespeare are somewhat strained, Alleyn’s name pops right out following the tripartite anagram form and in context gives us he is Alleyn and never prove an Alleyn.

Yes, trust them [Not: for therE is an] vpstart Crow, beautifieD with our                   NED

feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he                         

is As weLL able to bombast out a blankE verse As the best of You: and being         ALLEY

aN absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely shake-scene         N

in a countrey. O that I might intreate your rare wits to be

imploied in more profitable courses: & let those Apes imitate your Past

excellence, and neuer more acquaint them with your admired inuentions.

I know the best husband of you all will [Neuer proue an] Usurer, and thE            NE

kinDest of them ALL will neuer seekE You a kind Nurse:                                        D ALLEYN

The last line provides the figura condensa to reinforce the dying man’s chief complaint:

Although the Shakespeare interpretation might support Sidney authorship (Player is substituted for woman), I find the Alleyn anagrams more likely. The Alleyn anagrams are more tightly configured, and the overt text seems to be intentionally shaped to produce the correct letters with well and all supplying the doubled ll and you twice the distinctive y. Conversely the text provides a concise Shake near the top of the passage but does not complete the speare for want of a p for several lines which suggests a want of effort (and violates Bellamy’s rule of no barren lines). Since the other Shakespeare instance relies entirely on Shake-scene we are left with one weak instance and another that begs the question rather than independently confirming the identification. Either way, the example warns us to be careful of unintended identifications emerging from too determined search.

Continue reading: Jonson, the Herberts and the First Folio

[1] Peter Bull, “Tired with a Peacock’s Tail: All Eyes on the Upstart Crow,” English Studies 101, no. 3 (April 2, 2020): 284–311, https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2020.1717829.

[2] Wraight A. D., Christopher Marlowe and Edward Alleyn (Chichester: Adam Hart Ltd., 1993).

[3] Dalya Alberge, “Christopher Marlowe Credited as One of Shakespeare’s Co-Writers,” The Guardian, October 23, 2016, sec. Culture, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/oct/23/christopher-marlowe-credited-as-one-of-shakespeares-co-writers.

[4] “Kind-Harts Dreame: Chettle’s Apology to Shakespeare for Greenes Groatsworth of Witte,” Shakespeare Documented, accessed February 21, 2023, https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/kind-harts-dreame-chettles-apology-shakespeare-greenes-groatsworth-witte.

[5] Bellamy, Shakespeare’s Verbal Art, 134.

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In 2007 Alistair Fowler published an essay[2] which challenged early modern English scholars to explore the use of anagrams to encode hidden meanings and connections in the works they studied. It has long been recognized that there was a fad for encryption among Elizabethans which advanced from simple first word acrostics to increasingly subtle and complicated forms, but efforts to divine alternate Shakespeare authorship based on encrypted messages had prejudiced mainstream scholars against systematic study to understand their use in period. Fowler had previously had an enormous impact on scholarly study of English literature with articles arguing the importance of genre, form, and even numerology in interpreting period literature. With support from Cambridge University, William Bellamy took up Fowler’s challenge and in 2015 published both an essay, Ben Jonson and the Art of Anagram[3] and a book length treatment, Shakespeare’s Verbal Art. Bellamy identified a passage in the Roman poet Horace’s Ars Poetica which covertly but comprehensively explained the rules for two methods for concealing information within written works. One involved embedding the letters MDCLXVI of roman numerals to indicate dates. The other was a three-part anagram or acrostic that could encode names or other key words to internally annotate a work. In Latin texts these hidden messages were signaled with the word anagrammata or the more compelling nodus amoris, which Bellamy translates as love knots,[4] encoded into the text. Based on Horace’s instructions Bellamy was able to document both the classical use of the form, particularly by Ovid, and its widespread use among early modern English writers, reaching a peak of popularity in the late 16^th and early 17^th century. In both periods, these anagrams were used to embed names or entwine them in text to establish connections that reinforced or added extra dimension or hidden meaning to the overt reading of the text. Unfortunately, Bellamy died just months after the publication of his book and even an essay from Fowler endorsing the findings was insufficient to generate much interest in tackling the dense and scholarly work, or overcoming the reflexive dismissal of the use of embedded anagrams in academic analysis of period literature.

Bellamy determined that these anagrams follow a consistent three-part structure. Each instance contains a forma, a figura extensa, and a figura condensa.[5] The forma signals the presence of the anagram with a word or short phrase that begins with the first letter of the concealed name and ends with the last. The figura extensa is a broken anagram or acrostic beginning with the first letter of the forma and spelled solely from letters at the beginning and ending of subsequent words, in the correct order. Finally, the condensa is a traditional anagram formed from letters in any order but in a more compact phrase (still imperfect, allowing for some unused letters). The tripartite format and strict rules for forming valid anagrams help to reduce the chance of spurious or chance identifications, but do not eliminate them (I provide an example in a following section). Bellamy argues that while convention dictates that the writer not explicitly acknowledge the presence of hidden codes, they should be hinted at by the overt meaning of the text, contextually appropriate and productive, in the sense that they contribute to the overall impression of the text. Typically, important identifications are repeated or exist in clusters that reinforce each other and further define the relation of the work to the hidden references. In this way, these anagrams function much like traditional literary allusion and need to be evaluated in much the same way we judge whether an author really intended a potential source to inform the reader of his work. Indeed, in my experience the most reliable and productive use of identifying such anagrams in period texts is that they confirm previously suspected sources and let us see new ones that function as conventional allusion independent of any hidden message.

In 1616 Ben Jonson published a collection of plays in the prestigious folio format, the first English playwright to do so, preceding the famous Shakespeare first folio by seven years. Jonson’s folio contained nine plays, but also scripts for Masques performed by nobles at the court of King James and an anthology of poems he entitled The Forest. The second poem in The Forest is Jonson’s seminal “country house” poem, To Penshurst, perhaps his best-known work today, studied in countless English Literature classes for its insight into the patronage relationships of early modern poets and their noble supporters. Bellamy highlights the short first poem of Jonson’s The Forest as an explicit exemplar which Jonson uses to introduce nodus amoris anagrams. The title Why I Write Not of Love itself is a wordplay on Nodus Amoris and Jonson embeds the Latin phrase in the poem establishing his use of the form and its dimension of hidden meaning. He also fills the poem with entwined Ben and Mary anagrams anticipating the next several poems of The Forest in which he uses anagrams to inform his tribute to his Sidney family patrons.

Why I Write Not of Love 
Some act of Loue’s bound to reherſe,
I thought to binde him in my verſe:		
Which when he felt, Away quoth hee			
Can Poets hope to fetter mee?				
It is enough, they once did get      	       			
Mars, and my mother, in their net:				
I weare not theſe my wings in vaine.				
With which he fled me; and againe,		
Into my rimes could ne’re be got			
By any arte. Then wonder not,           		
That ſince, my numbers are ſo cold,				
When Loue is fled, and I grow old.

The second line signals anagrams for Mary and Ben Ionson (I and J were not distinguished in Latin and often interchanged in period typesetting). The simplest is contained in the words binde him in which provides both the forma and extensa for the name Ben. Following Bellamy’s convention, I bracket the forma and bold the letters of the figura extensa below,

                                                I thought to [binde him in] my verſe:         Ben

binde him in functions as forma as it is a short phrase beginning with the initial b and ending with n. The e at the end of binde allows the full name Ben to be formed using only initial and ending letters in order so the phrase also completes the figura extensa. Bellamy will find Ben again in the final couplet which he identifies as figura condensa for the whole poem.

My provides a forma for Mary, again the complete name can be composed from eligible first and last letters in the succeeding lines. Finally, I thought to binde him in provides a forma for Ionson

Below I provide the text of the poem as analyzed by Bellamy. Forma are bracketed [ ] and letters composing the anagrams (figura extensa) capitalized, with (only) Nodus Amoris bold.[6]

Some act of Loue’s bound to reherſe,                       
[I thought tO [BindE him iN] [My] verſe:              M          B-E-N  I-O     

[Which] wheN he felt, Away (quoth hee)                 A         W          N       
Can PoetS hope to fetteR mee?                               R         O-R        S        
It is enough, theY Once did get                               Y         T-H        O       

Mars, and my mother, iN their net:                                                    N        
I weare [NOt theſe my wings] in vaine.                   NO                
With which he fleD me; and [Againe,                     D         A
Into MY rimeS] could ne’re be got                          I-S       M        M

By any arte. Then wonder nOt,                                          O        AR &  B-E-N 

That ſince, my numbeRs are ſo cold,                                  R         Y
When Loue IS fled, and I grow old.                                   IS        

The final couplet provides the figura condensa, from which we can form Nodus Amoris, Ben Ionson & Mary Sidney Worth

That since, my numbers are so cold, When Loue is fled, and I grow old

Nodus Amoris Ben Ionson Mary Sidney Worth

Having established the nature and presence of anagrams in Why I Write Not of Love, Jonson uses them extensively in the subsequent poems to create a more serious and substantial subtext to the playful praise overtly extended to his patrons and friends..

In To Penshurst, Bellamy finds anagrams, particularly in the last fourteen lines, that “recontextualize the overt dimension of the poem.” The entire poem echoes the biblical Psalms, both in structure and frequent allusions, and particularly the Sidney translation begun by Philip and completed by Mary after his death. Throughout are anagrams for psaltery which Bellamy asserts is “capable of comprising a covert quotation from inter alia Psalm 108.1-3 (as for example in the Authorized Version of 1611):

A song or Psalme of Dauid.  O God, my heart is fixed: I will sing and giue praise, euen with my glory. Awake psaltery and harpe: I my selfe will awake early. I will praise thee O Lord among the people: and I will sing praises vnto thee among the nations.”

He further singles out These, Penshurst, are thy praise, and yet not all as “a signal that the poem will culminate in a richly anagrammatic concentration of its key elements."[7]  Here is Bellamy’s deconstruction of these lines which will serve as a baseline for what follows:

These, [Penshurst, are thy] praise, and yet (k)not all.             P                     
  Thy lady’S noble, fruitfull, chaste withAll.                         S                     
His children thy great Lord [MAy] call his owne:                 A-L      MA                
  A fortune, in this age, buT RarelY knowne.                      T          R-Y                 
They arE, and have beene taught religion: Thence                E                                
  TheiR gentler [spirits have] [Suck’d Innocence.                   R                S-I

Each [Morne, anD eveN, thEY]] ARe taught to praY,        Y         M-AR-Y      D-N

  With the whole houshold, and [MAy], eveRY day,                          MA-RY       E-Y

Reade, in their vertuous [ParentS noble] parts,                     P-S                              
  The mysteries of [Manners, Armes, and ARts.                   A         M-AR             
Now, Penshurst, theY] that wilL pro-portion Thee              L-T      Y                    

  With othER edifices, when theY see                                 ER-Y              

Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else,                                           
 MAy say, theiR lords have built, but thY lord dwells.                       MA-R-Y         

He notes that “the duplicitous use of the word knot has the effect of transforming the nested gesture into a self-referential motto,” containing Psallere, Psaltery and Sidney:

ThesE, PEnShurst Are thy PRaiSE, And YEt [k]not aLL

As many anagrams and layers of meaning as Bellamy has identified in this final passage, he does not provide a satisfactory answer to the riddle posed in the second couplet, which has puzzled readers for centuries.

His children thy great Lord may call his owne:                                 
  A fortune, in this age, but rarely knowne.

The choice to praise the Lord of the house (ostensibly Robert Sidney) for good fortune in having neither been cuckolded nor fathering bastards himself has always seemed odd. Fowler acknowledges the curious nature of the complement but justifies it with “it was far from gratuitous in an age thought dissolute by more than satirists. But Jonson’s formulation is proverbial rather than satiric.”[8] The hidden context established by the Mary Sidney and Psaltery anagrams suggests that Jonson is referring to literary rather than literal children, and the general connection of the poem with the Psalms and particularly the Sidney translation offers a possible solution, that Jonson is among those who wish to see the Sidney Psalter in print. But it is not a very satisfactory explanation. Mary’s psalms were widely circulated in manuscript, widely acknowledged in print and although there were some recorded efforts to persuade her to publish them, they hardly qualify as hidden or unacknowledged works.

Jonson hints at another literary form, theatrical plays, suggesting we can read in their noble parts, the mysteries of manners, armes, and arts. He also puts the word plays on the tips of our tongues with the language of the poem –they, may, pray, day, and the overt and covert center of the passage praise.

Looking for anagrammatical confirmation, we find the word plays encoded three times (following the now familiar tripartite arrangement of figura condensa and forma [in brackets] followed by the figura extensa composed of letters in order in first and last letters of succeeding words.) But Jonson is in a revealing mood, and he also identifies which plays Mary Sidney has secretly authored.

These, [Pens]hurst, are thy praise, and yet (k)not all.             P                     
  Thy Lady’[s noble], fruitfull, chaste [Withall].                   LA-YS WILL               S                     
His children thy great Lord may call His owne:                                                         H                    
  A fortune, in this Age, but rarely Knowne,                                                           A-K                
They are, and have beene taught religion: ThencE                                                      E                    
  Their gentler [spirits have] suck’d innocence.                                   SHAKE         SP             

Each morne, and even, they ARE taught to pray,                                                     E-ARE   

  With the whole houshold, and may, every day,                                      

Reade, in their vertuous [ParentS noble] parts,                                 SP-E               
  The mysteries of Manners, ARmes, and arts.                                  AR      
Now, Penshurst, they that [will] pro-portion TheE               P-L      E                     WILL

  [With other edifices], when they see                                                                       WI

Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else,                    A                                
 MAy say, theiR lords have built, but thY lord dwells.           Y-S                              LLS

Following Bellamy, we look to the first line for a condensed anagram to summarize the concealed message. Here the implied k provided by Bellamy handily ties the (k)not:

I don’t expect anyone to accept that Mary Sidney was the author Shakespeare based on a few possibly coincidental patterns of letters in an obscure Ben Jonson poem. I didn’t. It did expand my horizon of interpretation to include the hitherto unsuspected notion that Jonson might intend to identify the Countess with Shakespeare and set me on a project to explore that idea which has consumed much of the last two years. In coming posts I will explore what Jonson actually tells us about Shakespeare, but first I will test Bellamy’s anagrams against another key source of information about Shakespeare, Robert Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit and explore what current research tells us about the Upstart Crow.

Continue reading: The Upstart Crow

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[1] Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio (Newark : University of Delaware Press ; London ; Cranbury, NJ : Associated University Presses, 1991), http://archive.org/details/benjonsons1616fo0000unse.

[2] Alastair Fowler, “Anagrams,” in Remembered Words: Essays on Genre, Realism, and Emblems, ed. Alastair Fowler (Oxford University Press, 2021), 0, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198856979.003.0017.

[3] Bellamy, William, “Ben Jonson and the Art of Anagram,” n.d.

[4] Bellamy, William, 18.

[5] William Bellamy, Shakespeare’s Verbal Art (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 5.

[6] Bellamy, William, “Ben Jonson and the Art of Anagram,” 18.

[7] Bellamy, William, 24.

[8] Alastair Fowler, “Penshurst Revisited,” in Remembered Words: Essays on Genre, Realism, and Emblems, ed. Alastair Fowler (Oxford University Press, 2021), 263, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198856979.003.0020.

Pray thee, take care, that taks’st my Book in hand, To read it well: that is, to understand.^[1]

Ben Jonson, Epigrams

When Ben Jonson implores his reader to “read it well: that is to understand” he is demanding that the reader approach the work hermeneutically, following a process of textual interpretation which dates back thousands of years but had gained renewed significance in the sixteenth century following the Reformation. Martin Luther’s sola fida, sola scriptura had denied both the intercessory function of the Church and its authority over matters of belief. It was up to the individual protestant to interpret the word of God from the textual artifacts available. This returned Christian faith to a text-based religion from an institutional one mediated by priests and their proscriptions. The new demands on readers and the social, religious and intellectual implications that spring from them pervade Renaissance thought and especially the works of Shakespeare who often explores them in the metaliterary subtexts of his plays.

At its core hermeneutics is as simple as parsing a sentence. As the reader encounters each word in turn, the specific meaning signified by the word alone is processed with the proceeding words and gains meaning from context. When the whole sentence has been parsed, an interpretation is found which respects the individual word meanings as synthesized into an organic whole and which credits the author with intention to communicate something in the context of a wider conversation. We all do this with more or less success every day.

Traditional hermeneutic practice extends these principles to entire literary texts. An initial reading offers both surface meaning and suggests richer cognitive structures through metaphor and previous texts through allusion. By considering how these additional meanings resonate with the literal meaning of the text the reader can speculate on the author’s intent to create a textual object in which all these layers function together to form a coherent work. The range of concepts and related texts within which a work is interpreted is called the interpretive horizon. The process of analyzing and interpreting a text is envisioned as an iterative sequence in which initial impressions and expectations define a scope for interpretation and synthesis and further consideration of this framework identifies additional ideas and texts which expand the interpretive horizon, while discarding others as fruitless in interpreting the work. This process of alternately synthesizing and redefining the scope of the corpus under consideration is called the hermeneutic circle. The process ends when we have a unitary interpretation which we believe exhausts the intent of the work and see no reason in our interpretation to add any more to the corpus of texts and ideas being considered.

Because the choice of content for the interpretive circle can determine the final interpretation, conflicts of interpretation often reduce to disagreement about whether some idea or prior work should or should not be considered within the analysis. Indeed modern critical theory abandons the idea that a single best reading is even possible, instead emphasizing reader response, the idea that each reader encounters the work with a unique interpretive background which defines how they understand the text. Thus Marxist theory and feminist theory constitute distinct and valid interpretations that come from privileging those distinctive perspectives. Denying the availability or salience of authorial intent constitutes the ‘Death of the Author’ introduced in 1967 by Roland Barthes in his eponymous essay. Whatever the merits of Barthes’ literary theory, in trying to parse Jonson for the identity and biography of Shakespeare we are very much interested in keeping him alive. The whole point of reading literary texts for historical information is to extract from them what the author intended us to find and not to substitute our own modern perspectives. The challenge and importance of establishing the correct interpretive circle for Elizabethan texts is perhaps best illustrated by an example in which Shakespeare himself explicitly raises the question.

“What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba”

Hamlet Act 2 Scene 2

Perhaps the most explicit reference to hermeutic interpretation in Shakespeare appears in Hamlet, when the prince invites the visiting player to perform a speech he had seen before, ‘Aeneas’ tale to Dido, and thereabout of it especially where he speaks of Priam’s slaughter,’ an apparent refence to Virgil. Hamlet’s interest is specific, when Polonius complains ‘this is too long,’ Hamlet directs, ‘Say on; come to Hecuba.’ As the player describes the distraught reaction of Hecuba to her husband’s death, his eyes fill with tears and Hamlet contrasts his own restrained and impotent reaction to the murder of his own father, ‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?’ While recognizing that the actor is reacting to a literary character with no personal significance to him is enough to contrast Hamlet’s detachment, the details of Hecuba’s story offer a much richer reading.

In Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages, Tanya Pollard argues that modern critics have neglected the popularity of Greek tragedy and particularly Euripide’s Hecuba in Elizabethan England, and that ‘Hamlet acquires different meanings if one takes seriously the play’s preoccupation with Hecuba as a symbol of the moving power of tragedy.’ Euripides Hecuba offers an alternative narrative for Hamlet to follow, ‘Unlike Seneca’s Hecuba, Euripides’s Hecuba uses lament, the ritual voicing of mourning for the dead, to transform her grief into violence that is depicted as both successful and justified. After passionately lamenting, first her sacrificed daughter and then her newly discovered, murdered son, she earns the moral authority to persuade not only her sympathetic chorus, but also the ruler Agamemnon, that she must punish the murderer Polymestor. Ultimately, with the help of her female attendants, she kills Polymestor’s children in front of him, and then blinds him.’

The relevance of this story to the Danish prince contemplating the player’s speech seems obvious enough to require no additional argument, but Pollard must also establish that Euripedes was available to an English audience. She supports this assertion with a review of its history of publication, ‘It was the first Greek play to be translated into Latin, by Erasmus, who published it with Iphigenia in Aulis in 1506 — only three years after the Greek editio princeps was published by Venice’s Aldine Press’ and in vernacular translation  ‘it was translated into Spanish in 1533; French in 1544; and Italian in 1543, 1550, 1563, and 1592, for a total of seven vernacular editions — again, far more than any other Greek play.’ Note the absence of English in the list. The modern academic biography of Shakespeare as a relatively uneducated actor from the Midlands with “small Latin and less Greek” has discouraged academic interpretation which considers Euripedes as a source in Shakespeare. Pollard has to argue against that consensus to validate her interpretation.

Pollard suggests the performance history made the play particularly relevant to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ‘It is also the first Greek tragedy with documented postclassical performances, directed by Melanchthon in the Low Countries between 1506 and 1514, and again in 1525 in Wittenberg — where Shakespeare sent Hamlet to study.’ Invoking Philip Melanchthon and Wittenberg connects with the religious subtext widely recognized in the play. The appearance of the ghost and Hamlet’s decision not to kill his uncle at prayer appear to defy Protestant teaching about purgatory and salvation. Wittenberg suggests the prince himself shared Melancthon’s irenic position, which left him theologically stranded between heaven and hell. Finally, Pollard considers the period critical response, ‘Gasparus Stiblinus, the translator and editor of the first Greek-Latin volume of Euripides’s complete works (1562), pronounced Euripides the prince of tragedy and claimed that Hecuba held the first place among the tragedies. Philip Sidney used the play as an example of the power of well-made tragedy, and Joseph Scaliger and Antonio Minturno similarly used it to illustrate proper tragic structure —compact, but with a complex variety of incidents in the plot — in their discussions of the genre.’ We will see that combination of Sidney, Scaliger and Minturno again when we consider Jonson’s first folio encomium.

Pollard’s argument seeks to bring “the predominantly female-centered canon of Greek tragedy” within the compass of Shakespeare’s works. Another source, even more closely matching the circumstance of Hamlet’s discussion with the player would bring in the world of Greek philosophy. In Plato’s dialogue Ion, Socrates explores the nature of acting with a performer of that name. Socrates asks if the actor is affecting his performance by art when he performs an emotionally charged scene – he specifically mentions Hecuba, or if he actually feels the emotions that bring his tears. Socrates inquires three times, ‘are you in your right mind’ or ‘are you not carried out of yourself’. He finishes with a question of how the actor perceives his audience respond. Ion’s answer provides a recipe for the forthcoming ‘mousetrap’, ‘for I look down upon them from the stage, and behold the various emotions of pity, wonder, sternness, stamped upon their countenances when I am speaking: and I am obliged to give my very best attention to them; for if I make them cry I myself shall laugh, and if I make them laugh I myself shall cry when the time of payment arrives.’

To my knowledge no one has ever advanced an argument that Hamlet draws upon Ion, or explored the potential significance of Plato’s philosophy expressed in the dialogue for the metatheatrical subtext of the play. Once again it is outside the box which scholars have constructed for Shakespeare based on Jonson granting him but ‘small Latin and less Greek’ and the apparent evidence from the Stratford man’s biography that he could hardly have acquired any more.

While we can, like Pollard, marshal historical and literary evidence to establish the relevance of potential literary sources, wouldn’t it be lovely if writers had left us instructions about where to look and what to consider? In my efforts to better understand Jonson I stumbled upon a relatively recent article that claims just that, that Jonson had used a three part anagram/acrostic derived from instructions in Horace to provide internal annotations to his writing, which he used to provide dates, and the names of the sources for his literary references.

Continue reading: Why Ben Jonson Writes Not of Love

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[1] Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio (Newark : University of Delaware Press ; London ; Cranbury, NJ : Associated University Presses, 1991), http://archive.org/details/benjonsons1616fo0000unse.

To be or not to be, that is the question.

                                                Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1

“That Shakespeare wanted Arte” is just one of a series of provocative judgements recorded by the Scottish lawyer, poet and inventor William Drummond during Ben Jonson’s visit to his home over the Christmas season of 1618-1619. Jonson had just completed his much celebrated 400 mile “long walk” from London to Edinburgh when he joined Drummond at his castle Hawthornden, 7 miles south of the city. What prompted the famously sedentary Jonson to undertake such an adventure is not clear. He may have been inspired by a quote from Seneca about the need to get out and see the world to make the sort of personal discoveries that drive great art; the quote provided the title for his personal notebooks published as Discoveries after his death. Whatever was the initial impetus, the decision was apparently confirmed with the lure of a wager. The wealthy gentlemen who supported and entertained Jonson found the prospect of the notoriously portly and self-indulgent writer ambling his 280 lb. bulk entirely on foot across the length of England too ludicrous to pass up. In order to certify Jonson’s compliance with the terms of the bet, he had a companion who kept a diary (still extent) recording every step of the journey, the dignitaries and friends who met him along the way and offered lodging, and the swelling crowds who gathered to observe the progress of the famous wit then recognized as England’s greatest writer.

Jonson stayed with Drummond for a few weeks during the early part of 1619, enjoying Drummond’s generous larder and repaying his host with wide ranging conversations about Jonson’s life and the writers and other prominent individuals he had come to know. We do not know exactly how these came to be written down, whether Drummond took contemporaneous notes or compiled what he remembered later, nor do we know what purpose if any Drummond intended for the information he compiled. After both were long dead, Drummond’s son gathered his papers into a notebook and arranged for their publication, the notes of discussions with Jonson appearing as “Heads of a Conversation” in the 1711 volume The Works of William Drummond of Hawthorndon.

Drummond’s modern editor Mark Bland notes that what survive from those conversations are provocative snippets, devoid of context, that give the impression that Drummond is an inveterate gossip snatching up anything that might offer offence or at least an amusing quip.

Jonson seems to have been aware of Drummond’s predilections, appreciative of his kindness, and sceptical of his pedantry. Drummond is reminiscent of Sir Politic Would-Be in the way that he fails to distinguish between fact and fiction, or between serious observation and his being gulled. He records, for instance, the anecdote about Queen Elizabeth being `uncapable of man', another about the packet of mail that was swallowed by a fish, and a third about the origins of the word harlot that Jonson had drawn from Sir John Hayward. Drummond appears to be baffled by Jonson's wit; and Jonson comes across as someone who has found one of his favourite characters and is overly enjoying the joke. Perhaps that is why Drummond observed that he was `given rather to losse a friend, than a Jest'. The `Certain Informations' is a remarkable document, but it conveys a feeling that Jonson's difference from his host was a little too obvious, and that he was endured for longer than Drummond might have cared.

Nonetheless, “That Shakespeare wanted arte” would shape views of both Shakespeare and Jonson for centuries. However sparse and unreliable, Drummond’s Informations offered something which had suddenly become valuable, recollections of the writer William Shakespeare, from someone who apparently knew him.

Shakespeare’s First Folio collection of thirty-six plays reached the public in December of 1623, ten years after the last play was written and thirty years after the name William Shakespeare first appeared in print in the narrative poem Venus and Adonis. The initial printing, probably around 750 copies, sold out within ten years, prompting a second in 1632 with only minor corrections of typographical errors. Assembling the folio is now understood to be primarily the work of Ben Jonson, following the mode of his own folio published in 1616. Jonson provided a brief poem To the Reader which opposes the enigmatic engraving of the author on the title page and an eighty-line elegy, To the Memory of my Beloved, The Author, William Shakespeare and what he hath left us that served for nearly a century as virtually the only information available about the author. Modern scholars also attribute to Jonson most if not all of the dedicatory epistle and letter to readers credited to the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell who nominally arranged to have the plays published in honor of their “friend and fellow.”

In 1642, all English theaters were closed by act of the long Parliament citing the inappropriateness of “lascivious Mirth and Levity” during the terrors of the English Civil War. There followed in 1648: “An Ordinance for the utter suppression and abolishing of all Stage-Plays and Interludes, within the Penalties to be inflicted on the Actors and Spectators therein expressed.” Dramatic performances did not resume until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, by which time the players of pre-war companies and their scripts and experience were all lost. Anxious to return the splendor of the Elizabethan court already becoming idealized as a golden age, the court and theaters turned to the three great folio editions of plays by Jonson, Shakespeare, and Fletcher and Beaumont which had survived in private libraries. Of these the plays of Shakespeare were not immediately most popular but grew in importance once modified to suit post-restoration sensibilities (Romeo and Juliet and Lear got happy endings in restoration versions). Two more editions of the Shakespeare folio appeared during this time, which added 6 new works (of these only Pericles is still believed to be substantially written by Shakespeare).

By the early eighteenth century, growing interest in Shakespeare inspired publisher Jacob Tonson to acquire the rights to publish the plays for an eight-volume octavo edition that would be more accessible to readers than the previous massive folio versions. He hired Nicholas Rowe, a successful writer of stage tragedies, to compile the new edition with modern act and scene divisions and to provide a biography of Shakespeare to meet the growing interest in the life of the author.

It was not long after the 1623 publication that readers began to put “Sweet Swan of Avon” from Jonson’s poem together with a line in a poem by Leonard Digges which appears later in the volume referring to a “Stratford monument” as instruction to seek the author in Stratford on Avon. There they found something similar if not identical to the Shakespeare monument that graces the wall of Trinity church today. Lacking any other information about the author, the date, April 1616, from the monument’s inscription became attached to the William Basse elegy for Shakespeare referenced by Jonson in the folio poem (I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye a little further, to make thee a roome). When the poem was printed with the 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s poems that date became the only biographical detail about the author published in the century in which he died.

Unfortunately, Rowe found little to add to the sparse details of a common merchant’s life that could be gleaned from the town records of Stratford. Birth (at least baptism), death, marriage to Anne Hathaway (or perhaps Agnes Whatley to whom he was apparently contracted the day before), children, some purchases of land and fines for hoarding grain told the story of a successful and opportunistic capitalist, but not of a great writer. Somewhat disconcertingly, the Stratford Corporation that served as town council appears to have effectively banned theatrical performance starting almost exactly at the time that Shakespeare was making a name in London. After dozens of performances in the 1580s reflected in payments on the company books, there are none in the subsequent three decades. In 1618 there is a record of six shillings to the King’s Men to not perform in the Guild Hall and skip Stratford on their summer tour of Warwick.

Looking for something more literary to intrigue readers, Tonson advertised for recollections of Shakespeare in London, and assigned researchers to canvas the countryside around Stratford. He gained only an easily discredited story of young William poaching deer in Chilcothe and writing a scurrilous poem about the local earl when caught, which necessitated his removal to London and explained his start in the theatre. Unfortunately, the deer park which purportedly tempted the young man into a life of crime and poetry did not exist until decades later.

All that remained for Rowe was to rely on the scraps of biographical material that could be gleaned from Ben Jonson’s poem in the Folio itself. Jonson’s apparent backhanded compliment, that Shakespeare had triumphed despite having only “small Latin and lesse Greek,” and the confusing lines that proceed it with cryptic references to bauds and whores could be conjectured into a narrative in which Jonson resented the success of the natural genius from a country town in Warwickshire and only grudgingly if poetically praised his work. Jonson’s notebooks, published after his death as Discoveries, revealed that while “the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, “Would he had blotted a thousand,” which they thought a malevolent speech.” When Drummond’s Conversations with Jonson were published a few years later Jonson’s assessment that “Shakespeare wanted arte” settled the narrative once and for all. The courtly and learned Jonson with his preferences for classical authors and allusions never got over his resentment that the rough lad from Stratford won the hearts of the masses as Jonson never could. Shakespeare was recast from the Stratford property owner and money lender into a carefree rogue who escaped the drudgery and possibly the law of his provincial hometown to become an actor and then on the power of his natural genius to produce the greatest works ever written in the English language. That Jonson was himself the son of a bricklayer who got his grammar school education on scholarship and only managed a month or so at Cambridge before poverty forced him to join the army in the Low Countries and therefore fit the Horatio Alger mold every bit as well meant little. His satirical city dramas filled with incisive portraits of middle-class scoundrels did not fit the romantic visions of eighteenth and nineteenth century readers. Nor were they apparently much troubled by the contrast between the extensive documentation of Jonson’s literal and literary footprints as he traversed the path from laborer to actor to writer for the court while Shakespeare’s similar journey left no records at all of his education, acting, patronage and connection to the world of the court, theater or literature.  

In 1776 a new editor of Tonson’s Shakespeare engaged lawyer turned literary scholar Edmund Malone to revisit the topic of Shakespeare biography. Malone was astonished that Rowe’s Account remained the only attempt to offer biographical details about Shakespeare: “That almost a century should have elapsed, from the time of his death, without a single attempt having been made to discover any circumstance which could throw a light on his private life, or literary career; that, when the attempt was made [by Rowe in 1709], it should have been so imperfectly executed by the ingenious and elegant dramatist who undertook the task; and that for a period of eighty years afterwards, during which this “god of our idolatry” ranked as high among us as any poet ever did in any country, all the editors of his works, and each successive biographer, should have been contented with Mr Rowe’s meagre and imperfect narrative; are circumstances which cannot be contemplated without astonishment (1821 ii. 10-11). Malone eventually generated the first chronology of Shakespeare’s plays, still largely accepted today, but abandoned his plans to write a literary biography based on insufficient evidence. His judgement was echoed by twentieth century scholars. E. K. Chambers and Samuel Schoenbaum, at opposite ends of the century scrupulously compiled the known and documented material about the author and debunked the forgeries and superstitions that had grown around the now legendary figure. Schoenbaum eventually changed his mind, and his attempts at assembling a biography from the documentary evidence opened the door to the modern biographies from Wells, Bryson, Bate and many others.
Still little of substance has been added to our knowledge of Shakespeare since the Folio was published in 1623. As Stanley Wells says, “Ben Jonson is the person who tells us most about Shakespeare. Ben Jonson was a colleague of Shakespeare, in the sense that some of his plays were put on by Shakespeare’s company, or one of them was, and he clearly, he writes very intimately about Shakespeare, he writes sometimes critically about Shakespeare, but he also writes that he loved him this side idolatry, he writes the first full critical appreciation of Shakespeare, the Ben Jonson elegy in the First Folioʼs a very important piece of criticism, the finest piece of Shakespeare criticism before Dryden, later in the seventeenth century.” Despite the recognized centrality of Jonson to understanding Shakespeare, shockingly little effort has been made over the centuries to understand Jonson. While his other works, especially his poem “To Penshurst” lauding the hospitality of the Sidney family country estate in Kent, have generated extensive academic work exploring their meaning and references, few have done more than highlight a few apparently key words in the Folio encomium to argue for or against the proposition that William of Stratford was the author of the works of Shakespeare.

Jonson promised the author, “Thou art alive while thy book doth live.” The remainder of this series will attempt to read Jonson as he wished, “with understanding,” in order to determine what exactly this most important source of information has to tell us about the art and the identity of the greatest writer who ever lived.

Continue Reading: Four (Five) Shakespeares: The Documentary Lives

Now Adonis was no other then the Sun, adored under that name by the Phoenicians; as Venus by the name of Astarten: for the Naturalists call the upper Hemisphere of the Earth, in which we inhabit, Venus; as the lower Proserpina: Therefore they made the Goddesse to weepe, when the Sun retired from her to the sixe winter signes of the Zodiacke; shortning the daies, and depriving the earth of her delight and beauty: which againe he restores by his approach into Aries. Adonis is said to be slaine by a Bore, because that beast is the Image of the Winter; salvage, horrid, delighting in mire, and feeding on ackornes, a fruit which is proper to that season. So the Winter wounds, as it were, the Sunne to death, by deminishing his heate and lustre; whose losse is lamented by Venus, or the widdowed Earth, then covered with a vaile of clowds; Springs gushing from thence, the teares of her eies, in greater abundance; the fields presenting a sad aspect, as being deprived of their ornament. But when the Sun returnes to the Equator, Venus recovers her alacrity; the trees invested with leaves, and the earth with her flowrie mantle: wherefore the ancient did dedicate the month of Aprill unto Venus.

Ovid's Metamorphosis. Englished Mythologiz’d And Represented in figures by G[eorge]. S[andys]. (Oxford, 1632), pp. 366-67

The Greek Adonis myth is believed to derive from the ancient middle eastern proto god Adon who died and was reborn in that deepest of myth traditions that aligns to the season of ripeness followed by the long dark winter and Spring’s hope and life reborn. Adon also has echoes in the Egyptian Osiris story and in the Christian tradition celebrated with Easter,

Investigating the references to time and numbers we can see that Shakespeare carefully wove that seasonal myth into the structure of the poem

By this the lovesick queen began to sweat,

For where they lay the shadow had forsook them,

And Titan, tirèd in the midday heat,

With burning eye did hotly overlook them,

Wishing Adonis had his team to guide,

So he were like him, and by Venus' side.

Venus and Adonis begins with the Sun already risen. In stanza 30 we learn that it is directly overhead – “the shadow had forsook them.” The sun god, here named Titan, looks down upon them and wishes to trade places with Adonis.

Later at stanza 89 the sun sets, “his day’s hot task has ended in the west” and Adonis finally offers Venus a parting kiss.

"Look, the world's comforter with weary gait

His day's hot task hath ended in the west;

The owl, night's herald, shrieks, 'tis very late;

The sheep are gone to fold, birds to their nest,

  And coal-black clouds, that shadow heaven's light,

  Do summon us to part and bid good night.

"Now, let me say good night, and so say you;

If you will say so, you shall have a kiss."

"Good night," quoth she, and ere he says adieu,

The honey fee of parting tendered is.

  Her arms do lend his neck a sweet embrace.

  Incorporate then they seem; face grows to face.

Stanza 136 line 816

With this he breaketh from the sweet embrace

Of those fair arms which bound him to her breast,

And homeward through the dark laund runs apace,

Leaves love upon her back, deeply distressed.

Look how a bright star shooteth from the sky,

So glides he in the night from Venus' eye.

Stanza 143, line 856 in the poem. “the sun ariseth in his majesty”

Lo, here the gentle lark, weary of rest,

From his moist cabinet mounts up on high

And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast

The sun ariseth in his majesty,

  Who doth the world so gloriously behold,

  That cedar tops and hills seem burnished gold.

Math

Shakespeare has noted the exact moments of noon and sunset on the first day, and sunrise on the second, as follows.

Noon line 177 stanza 30

Sunset line 530 stanza 89

Sunrise line 856 stanza 144

Subtracting we find the night lasted 856-530 = 326 lines, the half day from noon to sunset 530-178 = 353 doubled makes 706 so a full day would be 1032 lines. Dividing by 24 hours yields exactly 43 lines per hour. Which further tells us that the first day lasted 706/43 = 16.37 hours. If we consult an astronomical chart for London for midsummer’s day, we find it occurs on June 20 in 2024 and lasts 16 hours and 37 minutes from sunrise to sunset.

This remarkable coincidence prompted a seminal paper by Christopher Butler and Alistair Fowler in 1964, Time Beguiling Sport: Numerical Symbolism in Venus and Adonis. However, identifying the time of the poem with Midsummer day creates an interpretive problem with the traditional myth of Adonis. Adonis is traditionally viewed as an aspect of Summer, the Green Man born in the Spring and dying with the onset of Winter. Therefore, his death should occur on the autumnal equinox, not the solstice. But Butler and Fowler find another numerical equivalence in the poem. From sunrise until the end of the poem there are 55 stanzas, the same number that comprise the period of the night. So taking the first number as the length of the second day we have a day which equals the previous night, so Shakespeare has condensed the summer into a single day, and while Venus woos Adonis on Midsummer, he dies the next day at the autumnal equinox. After death he is transformed into an anemone flower. With its white petals tinged with red, the European wood anemone (Anemone nemorosa) or windflower is a woodland flower that appears before the trees have leaved out, as the first warmth of spring sunshine reaches the forest floor. Thus, it is a traditional symbol of spring, associated with that other equinox and its traditional celebration of the return of Adon in his Christian form. (The anemone native to the middle east, Anemone coronaria blooms in February in the warmer Mediterranean climate and is generally deep red, Israel has a festival around the blooming called Darom Adom)

There are many more explicit references to time in the poem, including the line that provided the title for Butler and Fowler’s article:

“A summer’s day will seem an hour but short,

Being wasted in such time-beguiling sport”

The long midsummer day will seem but a moment if they spend it making love.

However even the shortest night drags on as she anticipates the dawn without Adonis,

“Her song was tedious and outwore the night,

For lovers’ hours are long, though seeming short.”

 “A thousand honey secrets shalt thou know.” (1. 16)

“No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark.” (1. 240)

 ...a thousand ways he seeks

To mend the hurt (l 477-78)

“A thousand kisses buys my heart from me.” (1. 517)

“What is ten hundred touches unto thee?” (1. 519)

“He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles.” (1. 682)

“Is twenty hundred kisses such a trouble?” (1. 522)

“If love have lent you twenty thousand tongues…”(l. 775)

And “Ay me,” she cries, and twenty times, Woe, woe,”

And twenty echoes twenty times cry so.”

This last totals 20x2x20 woes for 800. Add all those up and we get the curious number 28,800.

There are 1440 minutes in a day (24x60) so this is the number of minutes in 20 days. Twenty is another number which recurs repeatedly in the poem. Burton and Fowler believe that its importance derives from the fact that Wriothesley (the dedicatee) was 20 years old when the poem was published. They also note that during the twenty-year period of Southampton’s life there have been 12 conjunctions of the Sun and Venus which corresponds to the number of kisses Venus extracts from Adonis.

Having managed to set the scene and characters in just 6 lines, Shakespeare lets Venus take over for three stanzas of flattery and promises of pleasurable sport. This too sets the tone of the poem; a good portion of the remaining 195 stanzas is comprised of Venus making increasingly inventive, explicit and desperate pleas for Adonis to tarry a while and forget that nasty boar.

In these three stanzas Shakespeare establishes three themes that he will explore throughout the poem. The first is Venus’ use of rhetoric in her efforts to seduce Adonis (and the reversal of traditional gender roles in making her the sexual aggressor). The second is the poem’s complex numerical structure, particularly related to the marking of time. The third is alchemical allegory symbolically centered in the interplay of the colors red and white. I will consider the first two in subsequent posts but want to begin with the role of alchemy and color symbolism in the poem.

We already encountered the red-white theme three times in the first stanza, although modern readers may not recognize all three. The sun with purple-colored face is glossed in modern annotations with a note that renaissance purple was more red and vivid than our modern conception of the color and offers crimson as a synonym. I am not sure that is altogether right, but purple-faced is probably intended to evoke red-faced, the flushed condition of someone whose skin is reddened with bloodflow as the result of exertion, excitement or embarrassment. The blood connection to purple is the same either way. Next, Adonis is rose-cheeked establishing the correspondence with the sun and most closely embodying the red-in-white color symbolism we will find repeated throughout the poem. Finally, Venus is “like a bold-faced suitor.” Bold-faced is etymologically complex. If you google the term you will find a host of sites discussing whether it is properly bald-faced or bold-faced (in the context of lying). Here Shakespeare trades on the ambiguity of early modern spelling and pronunciation. Bold indicates that Venus is shameless in her pursuit of Adonis. Bald in early usage does not mean hairless but rather white (hence the American Bald eagle, perhaps significantly Hereford cows were described as bald-faced).

In Venus’ speech in stanza 2 she declares Adonis, “More white, and red, then doves, or roses are.” In stanza 4 she describes how her short kisses will make Adonis’ lips red with blood and then pale as the blood is forced out in one long kiss.

On the surface then we can see red represents blood and white the bloodless body. This takes us immediately to the medieval/renaissance theory of the galenic humours, their role in health and psychology and their correspondence with the elements (air, water, earth and fire) which were believed to compose physical reality. In Galen’s theory, both physical and mental health depend on balancing the moisture and heat in the body. These properties in turn were carried by four bodily fluids: blood (hot and wet, the sanguine humor, red), phlegm (cold and wet, phlegmatic, white), black bile (cold and dry, melancholia, black) and yellow bile (hot and dry, choleric, yellow).

In humorous terms the Sun in line 1 is sanguine, Dawn is phlegmatic, Adonis is all wet (both red and white) as is Venus until Adonis dies when she becomes melancholic.

Another way to read red and white is as symbols for beauty and virtue. In the earliest version of the Venus and Adonis myth there is no boar. Mars gets wind of Venus’ new crush and in a fit of jealousy goes to smash the presumptuous youth. When Venus realizes what is about to happen she races to stop the slaughter. Racing through the woods her skin is torn by the thorns of roses along the way, her blood stains the flowers red.  In the Platonic sources for Venus and Adonis that informed Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, love or passion is a vital force which can lead to destruction if not restrained by reason or virtue. In this reading Adonis represents rational control and Venus passion. The problem is that Adonis’ rejection of Love leads only to his death so it is hard to see how the story was intended to be read in this interpretation.

The most elaborate reading of the poem and its red and white symbolism is as an alchemical allegory. While most modern readers associate alchemy only with the futile and possibly fraudulent effort to transmute base materials into gold, in Shakespeare’s time alchemy encompassed both a wide variety of sophisticated chemical manipulations (exoteric alchemy – what happened in a flask in a laboratory) and a theological and psychological system for individual enlightenment (esoteric or spiritual alchemy). In this theory the fallen state of man could be redeemed by a path of learning and personal sacrifice that led to enlightenment. Renaissance alchemy was a mixture of classical and eastern esoteric practice, early experimental chemistry, Platonic philosophy and Christian theology, which came together in the work of Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino in the mid fifteenth century and was developed and elaborated upon by many up to and including Isaac Newton.

In alchemy the colors red and white signify the male and female principles (sort of more basic elements that make up reality). Red represents Philosophical Sulfer (not to be confused with the ordinary smelly kind) and White, Philosophical Mercury. In theory these principles could be recovered from ordinary dross matter in the laboratory through a long process of dissolving, distilling and purifying in the alchemical alembic. Similarly a virtuous and studious individual could cleanse his soul of impurities carefully separating his material body and higher consciousness and purifying each until finally reuniting body, soul and spirit into a higher, enlightened being able to perceive and act upon the divine forms. This process of spiritual and intellectual integration was allegorized as a marriage of the various levels of consciousness which reconciled the polarities inherent in ordinary mortal beings.

We see three of these “Chemical Weddings” in Venus and Adonis, the first the truncated and disappointing bodily union of male and female consummated between Venus and Adonis at the end of the first day. The second an even less satisfactory conjunction of the very material boar and Adonis at the end of the night, and finally the integration of white and red in the flower which emerges in place of Adonis’ body at the end.

The blackness of the boar is the third primary color in alchemy. The “great work” is accomplished in three stages – the Nigredo, in which the grossness and impurity of the physical body is burned away in a dark night of the soul, a kind of ritual, spiritual, or symbolic death from which the pure spirit and soul and emerge. The Albedo (or whitening) is the process of cleansing the soul, or the stone the physical vessel for the reunified being. Finally the Rubedo reunites the levels of consciousness – the red and white as the red male principle penetrates and stains the white purified body to produce the Philosophers stone.

Continue reading: Venus and Adonis: The Equinoctial Boar and the Easter Flower

Venus and Adonis: Stanza 1

Even as the sun with purple-colored face

Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,

Rose-cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase.

Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn.

  Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him

  And like a bold-faced suitor 'gins to woo him.

Finally, we are ready to encounter Venus and Adonis with a sense of what his first readers would have had in mind as they read the poem (at least the ones who were following literary developments in 1593 London). In this post I intend to discuss just the first stanza, which is all that Shakespeare provides of narration to set the scene and introduce his characters.

The first thing that strikes the reader (by which I mean me) is the sheer beauty of the language. The first sentence offered to the public by William Shakespeare “Even as the sun with purple-colored face Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase.” is about as showy an entrance into the literary world as any writer ever made.

Paul West, In Praise of Purple Prose for the New York Times, writes, “Of course, purple is not only highly colored prose. It is the world written up, intensified and made pleasurably palpable, not only to suggest the impetuous abundance of Creation, but also to add to it by showing - showing off - the expansive power of the mind itself, its unique knack for making itself at home among trees, dawns, viruses, and then turning them into something else: a word, a daub, a sonata. The impulse here is to make everything larger than life, almost to overrespond, maybe because, habituated to life written down, in both senses, we become inured and have to be awakened with something almost intolerably vivid. When the deep purple blooms, you are looking at a dimension, not a posy.”

The term “purple prose’ derives from latin poet Horace’s Ars Poetica. Ben Jonson’s translation of the passage is below:

In grave beginnings, and great things profest

You have oft-times, that may out-shine the rest,

A purple piece, or two stitch'd in: when either

Diana's Grove, and Altar, with the nether

Bouts of fleet waters, that doe intertwine

The pleasant grounds, or when the River Rhine,

Or Rain-bow is describ'd; but here was now

No place for these:

Here, a poem about the Goddess of Love, in love, is about as purple as a place can be. Shakespeare does not give a precise setting or time, only a purpled dawn in the wilderness of Arcadia where Adonis, and Venus, are on the hunt.

The sun with purple-colored face and the weeping morn are examples of Prosopopeia – the proper Greek term of rhetoric for giving human features to natural objects. Astute readers would recognize these apotheosized figures as the divine representations of the Sun God Helios (sometimes conflated with Phoebus Apollo) and his sister Aurora, Goddess of the Dawn. The traditional invocation of dawn drawn from Homer (“Now when Dawn in robe of saffron was hastening from the streams of Okeanos”), and Virgil and repeated nearly verbatim in Clapham’s Narcissus has her, saffron-robed, race across the sky heralding the new day and bridging the liminal period between the night ruled by her sister Selene (the Moon) and brother Helios (the Sun). Shakespeare leaves her behind and it is the Purple-faced Sun that colors our scene. Readers expecting to find Philip and Mary Sidney are thus immediately rewarded by the weeping sister mourning her departed brother. Knowing the Aurora myths gives the weeping morn further significance for the story to come. Aurora weeping is an aetiological myth (it explains the morning dew) from classical mythology. In the Homeric myth the immortal Aurora falls in love with a Trojan prince, Tithonus, and begs Zeus to make him immortal. He grants the wish, but she had failed to ask for eternal youth as well, so the beautiful young Tithonus quickly, in the eternal life of the goddess, becomes aged and decrepit. Still, she remains with him, crying for his condition each morning when she must leave to bring the new day. When he is no longer recognizably a man at all she transforms him into a Cicada whose gentle buzzing greets the day each morning. Homer’s story is particularly salient to Venus and Adonis because it is offered as warning to Anchises later abducted by Venus. From their union comes Aeneas, the protagonist of Virgil’s Aeneid and founder of Rome.  Alternatively, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses book 13, we see Aurora as mother of Memnon, her son by Tithonus, who fights an epic battle with Achilles before the gates of Troy. All the gods are in attendance and when Achilles slays Memnon, Zeus grants Aurora’s wish that the body not be left to be defiled, transforming Memnon and his wailing mourners into a cloud of smoke and then a flock of shorebirds (Black Ruffs for the twitchers among you). The first story speaks to the transience of youth and the dangers of consorting with gods, the second to the perils of battle even for those beloved of the gods, and so weeping Aurora reminds the reader of what will be the outcome of Venus wooing of Adonis.

Purple-colored is a compound adjective, one of four that appear in just these six lines – purple-colored, rose-cheeked, sick-thoughted, and bold-faced. All but the first are listed as first recorded usage in the OED. Shakespeare is writing at a time when the English language is evolving rapidly, incorporating words from classical languages and other romance and Germanic sources to describe the increasingly industrialized, urban and culturally modern world of the late renaissance. Shakespeare gets disproportionate credit, as many of the words that first appear in Shakespeare were likely in spoken use and print that simply has not survived, but there is little doubt that the bard is intentionally shaping the language to his poetic and dramatic needs. It is not for nothing that Bloom credits him with the invention of the modern human.

The characterization of place and time in the first two lines does not even make a complete sentence, “Even as” makes it a subjunctive clause. “Rose-cheeked Adonis” is the subject of the sentence introduced in line 3 in media res (in the middle of the action) as he “hied him to the chase.” “Even as” as preposition also introduces an interesting ambiguity to the first lines. We can take it simply to mean at the same time as, simply setting the time, or could read it as introducing metaphoric parallel of the sun with Adonis.

 Shakespeare uses alliteration of h and l words to tie the poem together – “had ta’en him,” “hied him,” and Hunting he” bind the dependent clause of the first two lines to the next two introducing Adonis. “Hunting he loved but love he laughed to scorn” lead us to Venus the goddess of love who appears in the final couplet. This is also an example of polyptoton, he uses love first conjugated as a verb then as a noun in antithesis. In both constructions the grammar is inverted by placing the object (Hunting and Love) before subject and verb which emphasizes the antithesis of his affection. Both alliteration and grammar bring particular attention to the creative construction “laughed to scorn” to express his dismissal of the emotional state and foreshadowing his response to its embodied form that follows.

Finally, we meet Venus “sick-thoughted” or love sick, an inversion as this madness is usually attributed to her rather than of her. Unlike other tellings of the story we are offered no explanation for her condition, she is not accidentally or intentionally struck by Cupid’s arrow, nor are we told what she saw or heard to inspire her love. We probably should not share the Victorian and sometime modern woke concern that her love is for a prepubescent boy and there-fore sick in a moral sense. This is the passion of divinely inspired madness argued about in Plato, not the pedophilia which often accompanied it. The stanza ends as Venus “gins to woo him.” Shakespeare the dramatist is done with narration and the next stanza proceeds with Venus speaking directly to Adonis setting a tone for the remainder of the poem in which she is the active party. This is emphasized by the use of Epistrophe, (the use of the same word at the end of successive verse-lines) in which Adonis, as him is object of her action.

Sick-thoughtèd Venus makes amain unto him

And, like a bold-faced suitor, gins to woo him.

I want to conclude by reviewing Shakespeare’s use of meter in the poem. Wikipedia will tell you that Venus and Adonis is written in iambic pentameter, the characteristic meter of Shakespeare’s blank verse that echoes the beating of the human heart and the natural rhythm of English speech - badum badum badum badum badum. Five iambs or iambic feet per line. Try reading it that way -  it is immediately apparent that Shakespeare is not committed to keeping that meter. If we read naturally and mark the stressed syllables with a downstroke we can identify how he uses meter to shape our reading.

The opposite of an iamb is a trochee, a foot in which the first syllable is stressed and the second is not. Purple as a word represents a trochee.

  / _   /   _    /    _        /  _      /  _       /

Even as the sun with purple-colored face

  _      /    _    /        /     _   _      /     _      /

Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,

(the repeated emphasis of “last leave’ forces us to pause before moving on)

     /        /        _  /  _    /      _    /   _     /

Rose-cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase.

    /   _    _     /        _     /     _       /        _    /

Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn.

(Notice how the initial trochee echoes the broken rhythm of a galloping horse)

     /        /       _      /   _       /       _  /     _  /     _

  Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him

     _     /    _    /      _         /  _     /    _     /      _

  And like a bold-faced suitor 'gins to woo him.

(the unstressed him at the ends of the final couplet make these feminine lines, underscoring that Venus will be the aggresor in the poem and Adonis the passive object)

Continue reading: Venus and Adonis: More white, and red than doves or roses

On November 8th, 1623, publisher Edward Blount registered 18 previously unpublished plays by the author William Shakespeare with the Stationer’s Guild in London. Jacobean England did not offer authors copyright protection for their work. Instead, the guild of printers and publishers protected their own members who made the expensive investment of typesetting and printing a volume from competition from anyone (including the author) offering the same material (Taylor’s Version was not a thing of this past). Registration prevented licensed printers from offering competing editions (unlicensed printers faced loss of their hands or hanging so this was reasonably effective as deterrence). At the same time works were registered they could be reviewed and approved for sale by the revels office, a function of the Lord Chamberlain which regulated both printing and public performance of plays. For the forthcoming Folio collection of Shakespeare’s plays this was especially important because the Lord Chamberlain, William Herbert Earl of Pembroke, had placed an interdiction on the publication of any new work from Shakespeare. In 1619 printer William Jaggard had attempted to get out a selection of Shakespeare plays (known today as the “false” folio) by ante-dating previously unreleased works but the revels office had caught the deception and the effort had to be abandoned. In waiting so long to license the work, Blount has taken a substantial risk. Printing the 36 plays of the folio, over 900 pages of material, had taken almost two years and cost almost 300 pounds just for paper and printing. Blount must have had strong advance assurances from Pembroke that the work could be sold when completed.

We don’t know when the last page came off the press and the volume was first offered for sale in the bookstalls around St. Paul’s cathedral in the center of London. The first documented sale was to Sir Edward Dering, a 25-year-old antiquarian and book collector who recorded the purchase in his account book on December 5^th 1623. He bought two copies. As the title page does not indicate a precise date of publication these two dates a month apart are all we have to mark the release of what has subsequently become the most valuable and arguably most important book in the English language.

This is the real story of the Folio, the people behind the scenes who wrote, edited and published the plays of William Shakespeare in 1623 as revealed by the documents and writings that survive from that time. It is a fascinating and largely unknown story, full of the literary and political figures whose lives shaped a critical moment in which our modern world began to take shape. At the center of the story are Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s friend and rival, and the man responsible for nearly everything we know (or think we know) about the author, William Herbert, Jonson’s patron, at the time the most important official in King James government, but at political and personal risk because of his opposition to a Spanish marriage for Prince Charles, and his own potentially scandalous affair with his cousin, and Herbert’s mother, a woman most people have never heard of, Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke.

I begin with Ben Jonson who, as Shakespeare Birthplace Trust chairman Stanley Wells says, “is the person who tells us most about Shakespeare.”

Ben Jonson and the Folio

Ben Jonson and the Art of Shakespeare

The Four Five Shakespeares: the Documentary Lives

Reading with Understanding: the Hermeneutic Circle

Why Ben Jonson Writes Not of Love

The Upstart Crow

Jonson, the Herbert Family and the First Folio

To the Memory of My Beloved

Bauds, Whores and William Basse

Wits to Read: Francis Meres and Shakespeare’s Small Latin

Sweet Swan of Avon

Thy Stratford Moniment

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