So, the question I have is that if Jonson wanted to identify Mary Sidney as the "real" Shakespeare, why didn't he just do that? She's been a published playwright since 1595 and by 1623 there's no reason on earth that I can see why she wouldn't be able to accept praise for authoring all the plays in the folio. Why would Jonson find it necessary to indulge in such a fantastic game of literary hide and seek?
In short, Mary had begun to publish the Folio under her own name when she died of smallpox in October of 1621. William was in a precarious political position because of his opposition the the Spanish Match, and personally compromised by the publication of Mary Sidney Wroth's Urania which revealed aspects of their affair, so a compromise with Jonson was reached.
Same question. However precarious the Herbert's political position was, it did not prevent the Folio from acknowledging their patronage in 1623. The line between that and simply crediting their deceased mother with the plays does not seem terribly wide to me. Mary Sidney is not Mary Wroth and William's politics did not prevent publication of the Folio, which had already been delayed, according to you. We have no evidence that Lady Pembroke was planning to or had begun publication of "Shakespeare's" plays prior to that. If publication was potentially so very incendiary, better to have put it off or shelve it altogether. On the other hand, it might have been viewed as a buttress against the Herbert's decline, something to their credit. The fact that Lady Pembroke kept a house near Jaggard's print shop proves nothing other than that she could afford it. As for Ralph Crane, since his copies do not survive, it does not seem that we can even know whether they accurately represent the plays published in the Folio. Amazing that the same people who took pains to preserve the plays did not see any reason to preserve the chain of custody regarding prior versions or original manuscripts. One might almost think they had a reason for destroying them, but we will never know for sure.
Really? I think you are saying that dedicating the book to the Herbert brothers reveals that Mary wrote it just as much as publishing under her name, but I don't think that is what you believe. If Mary is Shakespeare, then the Sonnets (published in 1609 but suppressed) are hers, and it is open season to try and place her family in them. Denny and Northumberland seem to have diverted attention toward their own family scandals and away from Pembroke during the fuss over Urania, but bringing his mother into the mix risks bringing renewed attention to the Herbert Sidney family drama at the center of Wroth's work. By the time the Folio was actually published at the end of 1623 the Spanish match had been abandoned and Herbert was in the curious position of trying to stop Charles and Buckingham from inciting war with Spain, so the political terrain had shifted, but the primacy of William's political concerns over establishing the literary legacy of his now deceased mother had not. As for why the publication went forward, Herbert may have worried that stopping it would draw more attention than allowing it to go forward with a false front. Personally I think that Mary had left a provision in her will for Jonson to print her plays, and that he insisted on honoring her desire at least in the way he did. Jonson seems to have lost favor with William after the publication, he may have actually threatened to disclose the will to get the family to agree to the compromise.
Marlowe is supposedly dead and you have only your speculative reading of the sonnets to keep him alive, but Mary taking lodgings across the street from the print house at the moment the publication of the Folio begins means nothing? I will leave you to review the evidence that the first plays printed for the Folio are from Crane's new fair copies, it is pretty much universally accepted. As for the destruction of manuscripts, have you read Jonson's Execration of Vulcan?
There’s an awful lot of speculation built on top of speculation in that answer.
First is the supposed primacy of William’s concerns over establishing the literary legacy of his mother. If only we had some record of that, like a letter to someone to help nail that down.
Second, is What Herbert may have worried about vis a vis drawing attention by publishing or not publishing his mother's mis-credited plays, insofar as no one seemed to know anything about it before hand (because it was a secret!), at least not that they were willing to make actual record of their interest in the above purely speculative matter. Meanwhile, publication with his name prominently featured did him no harm whatsoever. Do you suppose that the Kings code masters were any less learned than you or any more likely to be duped by Jonson’s supposedly transparent anagrams? Or Maybe, just maybe, Mary Sidney was not the author so nothing to see here.
Third, that provision in Mary Sidney’s will regarding Jonson’s publication of her plays: surely that is recorded somewhere? Maybe under someone’s second best bed?
Fourth, Jonson’s supposed threat regarding the same.
Fifth, go ahead and make the case for the lives of the Pembroke's as revealed by the Sonnets. You won’t be the first. I don’t doubt, but I cannot prove, that her contemporaries made some of the same conjectures. All for nought. I can’t see how any of that would harm Mr. W. H. as it was all very olde newes by then.
I am not saying that dedicating the Folio to the Herbert boys essentially reveals Mary was their author, I'm only questioning whether the supposed risk to them by going into print with it was lessened by omitting her name. If, as you say, Jonson knew the truth of things, I can hardly imagine that no one else at court knew, so any publication of her secret work, especially under the same name used to conceal her for twenty five years, would be no less a risk, if there ever was any risk at all. The Urania scandal involved William, not his mother, meanwhile, your entire argument regarding the shifting political terrain suggests that the (entirely speculative) risk of reviving interest in Mary Sidney, and by extension her son William who anyway had his name all over the Folio, had abated.
As for my “speculative reading” of the Sonnets, I’m only promoting the nine Rival Poet sonnets for now and all of that is carefully cross referenced with the actual publications mentioned in them. None of it is in any way speculative. I welcome any careful, as opposed to dismissive, reading of what I have outlined and will answer any questions you or anyone else would care to advance.
I believe that James and the royal family knew the identity of Shakespeare, as did the Herberts, Sidneys, Jonson, Daniel, Florio, Basse, Browne, Drayton, Fletcher, Massinger, Webster, Burbage, certainly the publishers, Blount and Jaggard, I believe that all of them at some point reveal the author to be Mary, although sometimes in quite obscure ways. The point was not to keep the secret, but to avoid it becoming the sort of public scandal that forced Wroth to withdraw the Urania and led her to be ostracized from court. As William is literally the most important official in James' court but is nonetheless subject to the whims of Villiers constitutes plenty of reason why he would not like to thrust his family affairs into the public spotlight which would surely have been the result of revealing that his mother was the preeminent playwright of the previous 30 years.
In fact William has been the co-favorite for the fair youth for centuries, with Mary Fitton as a favorite for the dark lady. Sidneians suggest that Wroth was the dark lady (and possibly the rival poet as well), and Mary Sidney suspected her of having an affair with Matthew Lister rather than with her son William. Indeed it is the settled opinion of Wroth scholars that that is the fairly transparent Roman a clef which constitutes the primary plot of Urania. The obvious reason why a noble writer could not publish under their own name is that every word would be parsed for potential relevance to the court and the monarch, with scandal (intended or not) threatened with every new work.
It is simple fact that the Folio is published with cryptic paratexts that avoid actually identifying Shakspere of Stratford as the author, and that many of the incomprehensible lines connect to Mary and Philip in suggestive ways.
I would be open to the Pembrokes serving as mentors and patrons of someone else as Shakespeare, I just don't see any hint of that in any of the third party mentions. I am sure Jonson knows who the author is, I can see an argument the revealing it was Marlowe who had somehow survived Deptford might be problematic, but I cannot get the text to point to Marlowe as author, though there are clearly references to the man and his work.
Oh and there is no record of Mary's will, although she left vast assets which were distributed among her sons and friends. It is extremely unlikely she did not leave a will, and therefore it is reasonable to speculate that it disappeared because its contents were inconvenient to someone that they paid off the rest of the beneficiaries. As William was most likely to be impacted by any revelations, and in fact proved most generous to everyone else in disposing of the assets, he is the obvious candidate for engineering the coverup. Also for several reasons the most likely source of the Stratford monument.
Most of this argument is aimed at postulating the possible reasons for suppressing common knowledge (ie: everybody who was anybody already knew) re: authorship of the Folio at the time of its publication which, according to you, carried no risk as long as it could be published without the actual author’s name but with fulsome dedications to the author’s progeny and a literary minefield of “cryptic para-texts” that basically did the same thing. None of this addresses why the ruse was necessary or useful in the first instance. If it was to protect so-and-so’s reputation, then by all means take that caution into account and restrict yourself to idle comedies or carefully edited work that avoids any mention of anything that could be misinterpreted. You could also rely on the Master of Revels to consult regarding offensive sections. Write plays that clearly support the Tudors, for instance, in your own name and reap the rewards thereby.
As for Marlowe, I again invite you to review my analysis of the Rival Poet sonnets. One of my most “speculative” passages inquires into the specific meaning of 78 lines 1 to 4. As that is where the whole thing begins, I would be delighted to get your take on it.
So, the question I have is that if Jonson wanted to identify Mary Sidney as the "real" Shakespeare, why didn't he just do that? She's been a published playwright since 1595 and by 1623 there's no reason on earth that I can see why she wouldn't be able to accept praise for authoring all the plays in the folio. Why would Jonson find it necessary to indulge in such a fantastic game of literary hide and seek?
I answered this at length in :https://www.marywasshakespeare.com/p/jonson-the-herberts-and-the-first?r=2phr51&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
In short, Mary had begun to publish the Folio under her own name when she died of smallpox in October of 1621. William was in a precarious political position because of his opposition the the Spanish Match, and personally compromised by the publication of Mary Sidney Wroth's Urania which revealed aspects of their affair, so a compromise with Jonson was reached.
Same question. However precarious the Herbert's political position was, it did not prevent the Folio from acknowledging their patronage in 1623. The line between that and simply crediting their deceased mother with the plays does not seem terribly wide to me. Mary Sidney is not Mary Wroth and William's politics did not prevent publication of the Folio, which had already been delayed, according to you. We have no evidence that Lady Pembroke was planning to or had begun publication of "Shakespeare's" plays prior to that. If publication was potentially so very incendiary, better to have put it off or shelve it altogether. On the other hand, it might have been viewed as a buttress against the Herbert's decline, something to their credit. The fact that Lady Pembroke kept a house near Jaggard's print shop proves nothing other than that she could afford it. As for Ralph Crane, since his copies do not survive, it does not seem that we can even know whether they accurately represent the plays published in the Folio. Amazing that the same people who took pains to preserve the plays did not see any reason to preserve the chain of custody regarding prior versions or original manuscripts. One might almost think they had a reason for destroying them, but we will never know for sure.
Really? I think you are saying that dedicating the book to the Herbert brothers reveals that Mary wrote it just as much as publishing under her name, but I don't think that is what you believe. If Mary is Shakespeare, then the Sonnets (published in 1609 but suppressed) are hers, and it is open season to try and place her family in them. Denny and Northumberland seem to have diverted attention toward their own family scandals and away from Pembroke during the fuss over Urania, but bringing his mother into the mix risks bringing renewed attention to the Herbert Sidney family drama at the center of Wroth's work. By the time the Folio was actually published at the end of 1623 the Spanish match had been abandoned and Herbert was in the curious position of trying to stop Charles and Buckingham from inciting war with Spain, so the political terrain had shifted, but the primacy of William's political concerns over establishing the literary legacy of his now deceased mother had not. As for why the publication went forward, Herbert may have worried that stopping it would draw more attention than allowing it to go forward with a false front. Personally I think that Mary had left a provision in her will for Jonson to print her plays, and that he insisted on honoring her desire at least in the way he did. Jonson seems to have lost favor with William after the publication, he may have actually threatened to disclose the will to get the family to agree to the compromise.
Marlowe is supposedly dead and you have only your speculative reading of the sonnets to keep him alive, but Mary taking lodgings across the street from the print house at the moment the publication of the Folio begins means nothing? I will leave you to review the evidence that the first plays printed for the Folio are from Crane's new fair copies, it is pretty much universally accepted. As for the destruction of manuscripts, have you read Jonson's Execration of Vulcan?
There’s an awful lot of speculation built on top of speculation in that answer.
First is the supposed primacy of William’s concerns over establishing the literary legacy of his mother. If only we had some record of that, like a letter to someone to help nail that down.
Second, is What Herbert may have worried about vis a vis drawing attention by publishing or not publishing his mother's mis-credited plays, insofar as no one seemed to know anything about it before hand (because it was a secret!), at least not that they were willing to make actual record of their interest in the above purely speculative matter. Meanwhile, publication with his name prominently featured did him no harm whatsoever. Do you suppose that the Kings code masters were any less learned than you or any more likely to be duped by Jonson’s supposedly transparent anagrams? Or Maybe, just maybe, Mary Sidney was not the author so nothing to see here.
Third, that provision in Mary Sidney’s will regarding Jonson’s publication of her plays: surely that is recorded somewhere? Maybe under someone’s second best bed?
Fourth, Jonson’s supposed threat regarding the same.
Fifth, go ahead and make the case for the lives of the Pembroke's as revealed by the Sonnets. You won’t be the first. I don’t doubt, but I cannot prove, that her contemporaries made some of the same conjectures. All for nought. I can’t see how any of that would harm Mr. W. H. as it was all very olde newes by then.
I am not saying that dedicating the Folio to the Herbert boys essentially reveals Mary was their author, I'm only questioning whether the supposed risk to them by going into print with it was lessened by omitting her name. If, as you say, Jonson knew the truth of things, I can hardly imagine that no one else at court knew, so any publication of her secret work, especially under the same name used to conceal her for twenty five years, would be no less a risk, if there ever was any risk at all. The Urania scandal involved William, not his mother, meanwhile, your entire argument regarding the shifting political terrain suggests that the (entirely speculative) risk of reviving interest in Mary Sidney, and by extension her son William who anyway had his name all over the Folio, had abated.
As for my “speculative reading” of the Sonnets, I’m only promoting the nine Rival Poet sonnets for now and all of that is carefully cross referenced with the actual publications mentioned in them. None of it is in any way speculative. I welcome any careful, as opposed to dismissive, reading of what I have outlined and will answer any questions you or anyone else would care to advance.
I believe that James and the royal family knew the identity of Shakespeare, as did the Herberts, Sidneys, Jonson, Daniel, Florio, Basse, Browne, Drayton, Fletcher, Massinger, Webster, Burbage, certainly the publishers, Blount and Jaggard, I believe that all of them at some point reveal the author to be Mary, although sometimes in quite obscure ways. The point was not to keep the secret, but to avoid it becoming the sort of public scandal that forced Wroth to withdraw the Urania and led her to be ostracized from court. As William is literally the most important official in James' court but is nonetheless subject to the whims of Villiers constitutes plenty of reason why he would not like to thrust his family affairs into the public spotlight which would surely have been the result of revealing that his mother was the preeminent playwright of the previous 30 years.
In fact William has been the co-favorite for the fair youth for centuries, with Mary Fitton as a favorite for the dark lady. Sidneians suggest that Wroth was the dark lady (and possibly the rival poet as well), and Mary Sidney suspected her of having an affair with Matthew Lister rather than with her son William. Indeed it is the settled opinion of Wroth scholars that that is the fairly transparent Roman a clef which constitutes the primary plot of Urania. The obvious reason why a noble writer could not publish under their own name is that every word would be parsed for potential relevance to the court and the monarch, with scandal (intended or not) threatened with every new work.
It is simple fact that the Folio is published with cryptic paratexts that avoid actually identifying Shakspere of Stratford as the author, and that many of the incomprehensible lines connect to Mary and Philip in suggestive ways.
I would be open to the Pembrokes serving as mentors and patrons of someone else as Shakespeare, I just don't see any hint of that in any of the third party mentions. I am sure Jonson knows who the author is, I can see an argument the revealing it was Marlowe who had somehow survived Deptford might be problematic, but I cannot get the text to point to Marlowe as author, though there are clearly references to the man and his work.
Oh and there is no record of Mary's will, although she left vast assets which were distributed among her sons and friends. It is extremely unlikely she did not leave a will, and therefore it is reasonable to speculate that it disappeared because its contents were inconvenient to someone that they paid off the rest of the beneficiaries. As William was most likely to be impacted by any revelations, and in fact proved most generous to everyone else in disposing of the assets, he is the obvious candidate for engineering the coverup. Also for several reasons the most likely source of the Stratford monument.
Most of this argument is aimed at postulating the possible reasons for suppressing common knowledge (ie: everybody who was anybody already knew) re: authorship of the Folio at the time of its publication which, according to you, carried no risk as long as it could be published without the actual author’s name but with fulsome dedications to the author’s progeny and a literary minefield of “cryptic para-texts” that basically did the same thing. None of this addresses why the ruse was necessary or useful in the first instance. If it was to protect so-and-so’s reputation, then by all means take that caution into account and restrict yourself to idle comedies or carefully edited work that avoids any mention of anything that could be misinterpreted. You could also rely on the Master of Revels to consult regarding offensive sections. Write plays that clearly support the Tudors, for instance, in your own name and reap the rewards thereby.
As for Marlowe, I again invite you to review my analysis of the Rival Poet sonnets. One of my most “speculative” passages inquires into the specific meaning of 78 lines 1 to 4. As that is where the whole thing begins, I would be delighted to get your take on it.