Shakespeare's Shadow

What does Mary Sidney have to do with Shakespeare anyway?

“Mary Sidney certainly makes an appealing candidate. All that is missing to connect her with Shakespeare is anything to connect her with Shakespeare.”

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.

Early Play quartos did not identify Shakespeare as author instead declaring they were “plaide by the Earl of Pembroke, their servants”

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.

Come, divine Poets and sweet Orators, the silver-streaming fountains of flowingest wit and shiningest art; come, Chaucer and Spenser, More and Cheke, Ascham and Astley, Sidney and Dyer; come, the dearest sister of the dearest brother, the sweetest daughter of the sweetest Muses [Mary Sidney], only One excepted, the brightest Diamond of the richest Eloquence, only One excepted, the resplendentest mirror of Feminine valour, only One excepted, the Gentlewoman of Courtesy, the Lady of Virtue, the Countess of Excellency, and the Madam of immortal Honour:

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:

All praiseworthy. Lucretia Sweet Shakspeare. Eloquent Gaveston. Wanton Adonis, Watson’s hayre. So well graced Anthonie deserveth immortal praise from the hand of that divine lady who like Corinna contending with Pindarus was oft victorious.

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.”

Journal of William Cory, 1865 Wilton

Aug. 5. The house (Lady Herbert said) is full of interest: above us is Wolsey's room; we have a letter, never printed, from Lady Pembroke to her son, telling him to bring James I from Salisbury to see As You Like It; we have the man Shakespeare with us.' She wanted to cajole the king in Raleigh's behalf he came.

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.

I do call to mind a pretty secret that the Lady of Pembroke hath written to her son Philip and charged him with all her blessings to employ his own credit and his friends and all he can do for Raleigh’s pardon; and though she does little good, yet she is to be commended for doing her best in showing veteris vestigial flammae” (a flicker of her old flame).

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.

Right Honourable,

Whilst we studie to be thankful in our particular for the many favors we have received from your L.L. we are fallen upon the ill fortune, to mingle two the most diverse things that can be: feare, and rashnesse - rashnesse in the enterprize, and feare of the successe. For, when we valew the places your H.H. sustaine, we cannot but know their dignity greater, then to descend to the reading of these trifles: and, while we name them trifles, we have depriv'd our selves of the defence of our Dedication. But 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: 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. There is a great difference, whether any Booke choose his Patrones, or finde them: This hath done both. For, so much were your L.L. likings of the severall parts, when they were acted, as before they were published, the Volume ask'd to be yours. We have but collected them, and done an office to the dead, to procure his Orphanes, Guardians; without ambition either of selfe-profit, or fame: onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow alive, as was our

S H A K E S P E A R E, by humble offer of his playes, to your most noble patronage. Wherein, as we have justly observed, no man to come neere your L.L. but with a kind of religious addresse; it hath bin the height of our care, who are the Presenters, to make the present worthy of your H.H. by the perfection.

But, there we must also crave our abilities to be considerd, my Lords. We cannot go beyond our owne powers. 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: And the most, though meanest, of thins are made more precious, when they are dedicated to Temples. In that name therefore, we most humbly consecrate to your H.H. these remaines of your servant Shakespeare; that what delight is in them, may be ever your L.L. the reputation his, & the faults ours, if any be committed, by a payre so carefull to shew their gratitude both to the living, and the dead, as is.

Your Lordshippes most bounden,

JOHN HEMINGE.

HENRY CONDELL.

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.”

Madam,

In the age of sacrifices, the truth of religion was not in the greatness and fat of the offerings, but in the devotion and zeal of the sacrificers: else what could a handle of gums have done in the sight of a hecatomb? or how might I appear at this altar, except with those affections that no less love the light and witness, than they have the conscience of your virtue? If what I offer bear an acceptable odour, and hold the first strength, it is your value of it, which remembers where, when, and to whom it was kindled. Otherwise, as the times are, there comes rarely forth that thing so full of authority or example, but by assiduity and custom grows less, and loses. This, yet, safe in your judgment (which is a Sidney's) is forbidden to speak more, lest it talk or look like one of the ambitious faces of the time, who, the more they paint, are the less themselves.

Your ladyship's true honourer,

BEN JONSON.

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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[1] Covell, William, Polimantiea 1595

[2] “MS Aubrey 8, Folio 50 Verso.”