Michael’s review of Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature > Likes and Comments
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This is a detailed reply, so this is Part 1:
Who's "the man from Stafford"? Izaak Walton?
And while it may be true that no one who advocates for Shakespeare authorship denial has been hired by a major university, that is mixing up cause and effect. Their intellectual and scholarly limitations that make them Shakespeare authorship deniers make them poor candidates for doing the kind of notable work in the field that attracts major institutions. If you're so ignorant of early modern theatre as to believe that it's possible a nobleman sitting alone in his study wrote the works of Shakespeare and then just sent a servant around to the stage door with the complete manuscript in hand, when rewrites might be demanded by any of the actors, the Master of the Revels, or so that the play could be presented as containing new additions in a revival; if your ear is so poor that you can't detect the gulf in quality between the acknowledged poetry of someone like the Earl of Oxford, whose only poetic pose was whinging and who treated alliteration as the poetic hammer, seeing every verse line as a nail; and if you're so cavalier about the evidence as to ignore the fact that EVERY piece of documentary evidence that identifies an author identifies Shakespeare as an author and that EVERY contemporary who bothered to comment on the subject, including many with provable personal and/or professional connections with William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, said that he was the author, identifying him by name, by his rank of gentleman (when the ONLY William Shakespeare, gent. was the man who was the son of John Shakespeare, who received a coat of arms in 1596 for his services in offices of honour in Stratford-upon-Avon), by his profession of actor, and by his home town; well... then chances are you're not going to make much of a scholarly contribution in your field.
That is not "religious fervor"; it is simply hewing to the only position that can be supported by the evidence.
Yes, and she lied and misread the documents to get there. For example, when she pretended that John Bodenham had made a too-frank 'admission' in the introduction to the reader in Bel-Vedére: or, The Garden of the Muses, she had to read the wrong header and, far less forgiveably, omit the fact that the ENTIRE introduction to the reader was missing from the second edition, not just this one line, as she implied. But then since the argument was Alexander Waugh's and she just plagiarized it, perhaps she didn't realize that he was lying to her.
The section of Bodenham's introduction reads as follows:
So we can see from the text that the first header applies to the "following" members of the nobility, and the second group that contains Edward, Earl of Oxford is under the header "From poems and workes of these noble personages extant [i.e., published]". Since all of the works from these people in this category have been taken from their PUBLISHED works, they CANNOT be the same people referred to by this header: "From diuers essayes of their Poetrie ; some extant among other Honourable personages writings ; some from privat labours and translations." Instead, that refers to the group of 24 writers whose number includes Shakespeare. And the fact that Bodenham places Shakespeare and Edward de Vere in different lists shows that he understood them to be different people, contrary to the imaginary scenario in Winkler's book where Bodenham knows that Shakespeare is Edward de Vere's alias. Moreover, since "extant" merely means published (or in one instance, "alive"), it is NOT an admission that their works have been published with someone else's name on it. It just means that their works have been published alongside others, which is obviously true. It's basically the usual editor's nod to assuage the wounded feelings of anyone who wasn't included. "It's not that yours weren't worthy—they are deserving of honor too—but these are just the ones I chose."
If this kind of garbage is meant to overturn hundreds of pieces of documentary evidence, then can you blame the real Shakespeare scholars for turning a deaf ear to it?
Shakespeare was not lower middle-class; he was upper middle-class: his father was a skilled leather-worker who married into the local gentry and he was a prominent local figure, rising to the positions of alderman, bailiff (equivalent of mayor) of Stratford-upon-Avon, justice of the peace, and magistrate. He was hardly a rag-picker. Furthermore. when Shakespeare was 11 John Shakespeare bought two properties (tenements, gardens, and messuages) on either side of his existing house to give himself a street frontage of 90 feet. To have a house that size and to be able to maintain it, including paying the servants to maintain a house of that size, speaks of a great deal of personal wealth. As for Shakespeare's level of knowledge, one CANNOT crawl into Shakespeare's head to know what it was he knew and didn't know. Therefore, all arguments based on what Shakespeare 'didn't know' are premised on pure speculation.
Are they? Can you cite any examples? This is one of those instances where the presentist ignorance of Shakespeare authorship deniers is the foundation of the entire argument. They assume because Shakepeare's witty, bantering aristocrats seem brilliantly true to life that they are, in fact, depictions of the real thing, and Shakespeare is denied credit for writing his own plays because he wrote too much like himself! In reality, there is hardly anything that seems convincing about his aristocrats when evaluated against the daily experience of the real early modern toffs. They are based not on real-life models but on the comedies of John Lyly (Shakespeare authorship deniers also don't read any of his contemporaries, so they don't see these influences). Take Lord Capulet, for example. On the eve of his daughter's wedding to County Paris, he starts directing the kitchen staff like some harried Elizabethan householder out of a domestic comedy. In a REAL aristocratic household, the lord of the manor would have given direction to the steward, who would have passed word to the butler, who would have then directed the kitchen staff (the butler's domain being the kitchen and dining room). Eventually Shakespeare did learn about the steward—Malvolio is one in Twelfth Night—but he is given nothing to do but the menial task of 'returning' a ring, which would have been beneath him and would have risked a domestic crisis erupting that he wasn't there to handle, and telling off Sir Toby and Sir Andrew in a way that no servant, no matter how provoked, would have ever addressed two knights.
More evidence that Shakespeare didn't know anything about court protocol lies in the fact that of all his plays, the ONLY one that makes dramatic use of the antechamber, where courtiers waited to be admitted to the presence chamber, is Henry VIII. Archbishop Cranmer is snubbed by the Privy Council and made to cool his heels in the antechamber—in a scene Shakespeare didn't even write; it was penned by his collaborator, John Fletcher. Fletcher was the son of the Bishop of London and Queen Elizabeth's personal chaplain, Richard Fletcher. HE knew court protocol.
The fact of collaboration is also damning to the Oxfordian case because John Fletcher had no dramatic career until AFTER Edward de Vere was dead. His first play, presented when he was 24/25, was The Woman-Hater (1607), authored with Francis Beaumont. How was he supposed to have written Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Cardenio (which survives in Lewis Theobald's adaptation Double Falsehood) with a man who was dead? And one wonders how de Vere could have read Don Quixote, Part 1, the source of Cardenio/Double Falsehood, since it wasn't published anywhere in the world until 1605 and not until 1612 in Thomas Shelton's English translation. The common Oxfordian excuse is that Oxford left unfinished plays that were completed by other writers, but a simple look at the distribution of scenes in Henry VIII is enough to put paid to that:
One must believe that de Vere wrote the first two scenes of Act I, then skipped over the other half of the act and the first half of Act II, skipped the first scene of Act III and only wrote half of the second, skipped Act IV entirely, then took up his pen again to only write the first scene of Act V. Who would do that?
But I digress.
Finally, an absolutely killer argument against the notion that the author was any sort of nobleman comes from Richard III. In Act II, sc. 1, Edward IV is making peace among the various factions in his court, and Richard (still Duke of Gloucester at this point) goes around insincerely glad-handing his enemies. As part of this forced accord, he greets "Lord Rivers" and then "Lord Woodville" and immediately thereafter "Lord Scales". The problem here is that all THREE of these people were, at the time, the SAME PERSON: Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers, who also enjoyed the subsidiary style of Lord Scales due to his marriage with Elizabeth Scales, 8th Baroness Scales. Now, admittedly, Shakespeare wasn't always the most consistent about chronology, so when he used the term Lord Rivers, he might have meant the 3rd Earl, his younger brother Richard Woodville. After Anthony's death, the title of Lord Scales and the lands attached to the title passed to Edward Woodville.
Part 2:
However, that only solves the problem of why there is a Lord Rivers and a Lord Scales; it doesn't solve the Lord Woodville problem. Shakespeare was dividing one person into either two or three parts because he didn't understand that the noble title could differ from the family name and the title could have subsidiary styles. Would Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, Viscount Bulbeck, Lord Escales and Lord Badlesmere make such an egregious error? I doubt it. Nor would the 1st Viscount St. Alban, Francis Bacon.
Shakespeare misses more details than he gets right, and there are times when he obviously doesn't care about the details at all. For example, he set two plays partly in Verona: The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Romeo and Juliet. In Two Gentlemen, he sends Proteus and Valentine off to greet their "emperor", which implied that Verona was a vassal city-state of Milan. It was not. It was a vassal city-state of the Venetian Republic. Moreover, the local ruler in Milan was not the duke, because the last local duke in Milan was Francesco II Sforza, who died in 1535. After his death, Milan got kicked around the noble houses of Europe until it became a possession of the Spanish Hapsburgs. So when Shakespeare was writing, the Duke of Milan was not to be found in Milan but Madrid, reigning as Felipe II. This also casts a sidelight on The Tempest, where Prospero neglects to mention that he was the King of Spain and he seems obsessed only with the loss of one of his minor titles. (Incidentally, both Two Gentlemen and The Tempest treat Milan as if it were a coastal city, which it is not.) But in Romeo and Juliet, what was formerly a vassal state of Milan is now an independent prncipality (it was NEVER a principality), whose prince, Escalus, is a speaking character in the play. This should go to show that Shakespeare didn't give a damn about accuracy in his Italian settings, and such accurate details as actually exist in the plays and are not fantasized into the plays by anti-Shakespearians are merely accidental at best. Ben Jonson and John Webster were both more accurate in their depictions of Italy, but nobody thinks they had to go on the Grand Tour.
What "sophisticated legal knowledge" is there in the plays and poems? Can you be specific, and show that it was significantly greater than the average degree of knowledge shown by contemporary playwrights? In fact, when the subject has been studied by scholars like Paul S. Clarkson and Clyde T. Warren in their The Law of Property in Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Drama, George W. Keeton's Shakespeare's Legal and Political Background, and so on, the consensus has been that Shakespeare's legal knowledge was only middling at best, neither as great as many of his contemporaries nor the lowest on record. The era was one of widespread familiarity with the law, because the law courts were places of public resort. People enjoyed watching cases being conducted just as much as they enjoy legal procedurals like the Law & Order franchise today. So MOST playwrights sprinkled legal allusions into their works. Some were better at it than others (e.g., the aforementioned John Webster, who may be the same John Webster who was admitted to the Middle Temple of the Inns of Court—there's more legal detail in his The Devil's Law-Case than there is in the entire Shakespeare corpus—and I've read both multiple times, so I know).
Now, with colleagues like Webster and John Marston who had studied law, or like Thomas Kyd had been legal clerks, we already have a pathway for Shakespeare to learn about the law. Another way is through his father, who was both a justice of the peace and a magistrate in Stratford-upon-Avon. A third way is through the allegedly "litigious" Shakespeare's legal experience: the majority of Shakespeare's legal allusions are to money lending, buying land, and wills. Where does he show up in the legal record? In cases dealing with money lending, in the buying of land and property, and in his will. They smear him as "litigious" but won't admit that his experiences with the law could have taught him anything. We know that students from the Inns of Court frequently attended plays and that they had The Comedy of Errors performed for the 1594 Christmas Revels. So what price Shakespeare just talking to one of these law students? Finally, there were legal books in print (and one of the books Shakespeare may have left his signature on is of that character: Archainomia by William Lambarde) and Shakespeare could have certainly read them. The deniers make much of the fact that Plowden's Commentaries was in "Law French", as if that constitutes an insuperable barrier, but Ben Jonson read Plowden for The Case is Altered, and if he could do it, so could Shakespeare. They won't tell you that Shakespeare took a hand in the marriage negotiations between his French landlords, the Mountjoy family, and another French Huguenot refugee, Stephen Bellot, so his French was presumably up to the job. Also "Law French" is not French but Anglo-Norman: the language combination that birthed Middle English. Shakespeare would have been naturally better positioned, by being only a few decades out from the widespread use of Middle English, to understand Plowden than any modern person would.
Did they? It's true that de Vere went to Italy, but Bacon didn't. He only got as far as France in the company of Sir Amyas Paulet. And while Bacon was a lawyer, de Vere was NOT one. He made crude errors in his legal Latin in his letters, he was the only one of the four wards of William Cecil at the time to NOT buy law books, and only ONE of Cecil's wards, William Carr, paid chambers rent and so seemed like he was making a serious go of being a lawyer. While de Vere was given a courtesy admission to Gray's Inn, that was a gesture extended to numerous members of the aristocracy in the days before the Restoration-era gentlemen's clubs like White's. They would go there to dine and while away the hours, but they were expressly not there to study.
But these are very good questions. Did Winkler's book answer any of them for you? Does she address why nobody said something? With respect to de Vere, they called him a murderer, a traitor, a necromancer, a sodomite, an atheist, etc., etc., etc. The idea that they would have been reticent about adding the word "playwright" is silly. Did any of them provide reasons why the alleged conspiracy of silence had to be kept up after death? Granted, Bacon was still alive in 1623 when the First Folio was printed (de Vere had been dead 19 years), but he was dead by the time Ben Jonson's Timber, or Discoveries was printed in 1641 (as was Jonson himself) with its essays on both Shakespeare AND Francis Bacon, so this seems like it would have been the perfect time for admitting that they were one and the same. Instead, Jonson treats them as two distinct individuals. And yes, the question about time is a very pertinent one. So is the question about motivation: what REASON would they have had for doing something as difficult as writing plays around the strengths and requirements of a specific theatre company neither of them had any connection with when, if they wanted to write dramas, the genre of closet drama was both more respected and easier to write? It can't have been for the money, because what a freelance playwright made for a solo-authored play (around £6 at the turn of the 17th century) wouldn't have kept old Ned de Vere in scented gloves for a week.
But what evidence did she actually provide? Did she show that any publication or publication record (the Stationers' Register, for example) attributed the work to anyone other than Shakespeare? Did she show that anyone explicitly stated that Shakespeare didn't write the works and [insert other name here] did? Or did she simply plagiarize the speculative claims of anti-Shakespearians, the specious and cherry-picked "biographical parallels", and the motivated readings of texts that very often had absolutely nothing to do with Shakespeare? Which conclusion follows naturally from the evidence and which is an attempt to argue AROUND the evidence that they cannot avoid?
This is a lie, and even if it were true, so what? What magic property does his lifetime hold that people would forget his very existence and everything he did the instant he died, even if they'd been twenty or more years in the same company that William Shakespeare was, like John Heminges, Henry Condell, and John Lowin?
If you want to argue that the identification of the author must be spelled "Shakspere", then Richard Stonley's note of his purchase of Venus and Adonis all the way back in 1593 qualifies. The equivalent spelling "Shakspeare" is in William Covell's Polimanteia, The Return from Parnassus, Part 1, the epistle to Bel-Vedére, or The Garden of the Muses by John Bodenham, the broadside ballad "A Mourneful Dittie, entituled Elizabeths Loss", Myrrha, the Mother of Adonis by William Barksted, and on two title pages of canonical works: the first quarto (1608) of King Lear (where it is spelled "Shak-speare", but the hyphen doesn't change the spelling), and on the first quarto (1634) of The Two Noble Kinsmen. On both quartos Shakespeare is given the honorific appertaining to a gentleman: M. or Mr. The latter quarto also identifies him directly as "gent." This is another identifier of William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon because the only man to whom the term applied was the one whose father, John Shakespeare, had been given a coat of arms in 1596 for his services in various "offices of honour" in Stratford-upon-Avon (the qualifying offices John Shakespeare had served in were bailiff—the equivalent of mayor—justice of the peace, and magistrate). He was also identified with the honorifics appertaining to a gentlemen in the Stationer's Register. For example, the 23 August 1600 entry reads:
And Edmund Howes' additions to John Stow's Annals contains a list of Elizabethan writers ordered "according to their priorities" (i.e., according to their social rank) wherein "M. Willi. Shakespeare, gentleman" comes right below "M. William Warner gentleman" and above "Samuel Daniell Esquire". This link of Shakespeare with his rank of gentleman shows yet again that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was uniquely intended.
And you know as well as I do that those so-called "detailed diaries" were medical case notes, not a "Dear diary, had a chat with stepdad about the Bankside theatre scene. Oh, the stories he can tell of Richard Burbage!" Drayton is in Hall's case notes because he treated Drayton. They also were NOT comprehensive, as Dr. John Hall tended to only document his successes. Finally, the only surviving book of his case notes has no entries dated earlier than 1617. Though internal evidence does show some undated entries may be as early as 1615, it's still MOSTLY OUTSIDE Shakespeare's lifetime and there is no evidence that anyone can supply that Shakespeare was treated by Hall in the final two calendar years of his life, nor that, if he were, the treatment was successful, since it was his successes he was interested in documenting. In fact, his death rather suggests that the medical intervention was UNSUCCESSFUL.
And as you already know, because I've told you, The Arte of English Poesie says no such thing. Instead, Edward de Vere is identified in a list of KNOWN authors. There is also nothing to suggest that he was known as the author of "THE plays", as you put it, since the book was published in 1589 before or at most during Shakespeare's earliest career as an author. How was the author of this book supposed to have known that Oxford was Shakespeare when there was no Shakespeare who was a public figure yet? Furthermore, the author does NOT identify Edward de Vere as an author of plays, but rather identifies "Th'Earle of Oxford and Maister Edwardes of her Maiesties Chappell for Comedy and Enterlude". Edwardes wrote NO known interludes and only ONE known comedy, Damon and Pithias, therefore the interlude-writer was Edward de Vere, and he may have been mentioned possibly on the strength of just one interlude. We know he took a starring role in a shipwreck device, so that may be the only reason he has for being mentioned at all. It certainly does not establish that Edward de Vere secretly wrote all of the Shakespeare corpus. Nor do we have any reason to believe he wrote his own shipwreck device when he had two playwrights, Anthony Munday and John Lyly, working for him as his ostensible "secretaries". That would not have been regarded as shameful or dishonest—it would have been natural that he would get the credit for his servants' work, just as if he laid on a great feast he would get the credit instead of his cook and serving staff.
Now, to return to the subject of Edward de Vere's allegedly anonymous authorship. You neglected to tell Mr. Reilly that he had already violated this alleged "tradition" by using his patronage of Thomas Beddingfield's translation of Cardanus Comforte to shove in a dreadful poem of his own under his own name. Why would he be so careless of "tradition" for his AWFUL poetry and so careful to disclaim his GOOD poetry, especially when his good poetry, published and given a suitably fawning dedication to the glorious empress Elizabeth, could have been the means to advancement at court and money that he was seeking throughout the 1590s by other means, chiefly by writing begging letters for concessions on Cornish and Devonian tin?
But I digress. A simple glance at the list of authors shows that Oxford wasn't being considered with the unknown writers, but with the "rest" who HAD published or let their manuscript works be known to be theirs.
Are you really trying to tell me that in the 16th century nobody knew that Geoffrey Chaucer was an author? And let's look at some of those other names. "Thomas Lord of Bukhurst" is Thomas Sackville, later raised to the 1st Earl of Dorset by King James. His Gorboduc, co-authored with Sir Thomas Norton, was the first blank verse tragedy in English, published in 1565 with their names on it. "Turberuille" is George Turberville, who, among other works, published this: Epitaphes, epigrams, songs, and sonets, with a discourse of the friendly affections of Tymetes to Pyndara his ladie. Newly corrected with additions and set out by George Turbervile, gentleman. Anno Domini 1567. "Gascon" is George Gascoigne. Two years before the publication of The Arte of English Poesie, this book of his came out: The Pleasauntest Workes of George Gascoigne Esquyre Newlye Compyled Into One Volume, that is to Say: His Flowers, Hearbes, Weedes, the Fruites of Warre, the Comedie Called Supposes, the Tragedie of Iocasta, the Steele Glasse, the Complaint of Phylomene, the Storie of Ferdinando Ieronimi, and the Pleasure at Kenelworth Castle. Clearly, this was NOT a list of secret authors, and you Oxfordians must LIE about the meaning of the text. The fact that you have to lie to make your case is exactly why nobody in any position of serious academic responsibility in early modern literature accepts Oxford as the author of Shakespeare's works.
That is because you are NOT a Shakespeare scholar; you are a psychiatrist who merely cosplays at scholarship. Yet in order to shove your Oxfordian delusions into the media cycle, you appointed yourself "Shakespeare expert for media relations" or something like that and pretended that you represented the scholarly consensus at Georgetown. Therefore the university was well within its rights to get you to stop using their name to add undeserved luster to a case you couldn't make by honest means.
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This is a detailed reply, so this is Part 1:She was struck by the religious fervor of the professional Shakespeare scholars. They objected to even discussing what is known as "the authorship question". It is clear that you cannot be hired by any prominent university if you admit to doubts about the man from Stafford.
Who's "the man from Stafford"? Izaak Walton?
And while it may be true that no one who advocates for Shakespeare authorship denial has been hired by a major university, that is mixing up cause and effect. Their intellectual and scholarly limitations that make them Shakespeare authorship deniers make them poor candidates for doing the kind of notable work in the field that attracts major institutions. If you're so ignorant of early modern theatre as to believe that it's possible a nobleman sitting alone in his study wrote the works of Shakespeare and then just sent a servant around to the stage door with the complete manuscript in hand, when rewrites might be demanded by any of the actors, the Master of the Revels, or so that the play could be presented as containing new additions in a revival; if your ear is so poor that you can't detect the gulf in quality between the acknowledged poetry of someone like the Earl of Oxford, whose only poetic pose was whinging and who treated alliteration as the poetic hammer, seeing every verse line as a nail; and if you're so cavalier about the evidence as to ignore the fact that EVERY piece of documentary evidence that identifies an author identifies Shakespeare as an author and that EVERY contemporary who bothered to comment on the subject, including many with provable personal and/or professional connections with William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, said that he was the author, identifying him by name, by his rank of gentleman (when the ONLY William Shakespeare, gent. was the man who was the son of John Shakespeare, who received a coat of arms in 1596 for his services in offices of honour in Stratford-upon-Avon), by his profession of actor, and by his home town; well... then chances are you're not going to make much of a scholarly contribution in your field.
That is not "religious fervor"; it is simply hewing to the only position that can be supported by the evidence.
She shows how some of the contemporary documents can be read to suggest that there were doubts about whether the Strafford man wrote the plays.
Yes, and she lied and misread the documents to get there. For example, when she pretended that John Bodenham had made a too-frank 'admission' in the introduction to the reader in Bel-Vedére: or, The Garden of the Muses, she had to read the wrong header and, far less forgiveably, omit the fact that the ENTIRE introduction to the reader was missing from the second edition, not just this one line, as she implied. But then since the argument was Alexander Waugh's and she just plagiarized it, perhaps she didn't realize that he was lying to her.
The section of Bodenham's introduction reads as follows:
Next, out of sundry things extant [i.e., published], and many in privat, done by these right Honourable persons following:
Thomas, Earle of Surrey.
The Lord Marquesse of Winchester.
Mary, Countesse of Pembroke.
Sir Philip Sidney.
From poems and workes of these noble personages extant:
Edward, Earle of Oxenforde.
Ferdinando, Earle of Derby.
Sir Walter Raleigh.
Sir Edward Dyer.
Fulke Greville, Esquier.
Sir Iohn Harrington.
From diuers essayes of their Poetrie ; some extant among other Honourable personages writings ; some from privat labours and translations.
Edmund Spencer.
Henry Constable Esquier.
Samuell Daniell.
Thomas Lodge, Doctor of Physicke.
Thomas Watson.
Michael Drayton.
Iohn Dauies.
Thomas Hudson.
Henrie Locke Esquier.
Iohn Marstone.
Christopher Marlow.
Beniamin Iohnson.
VVilliam Shakspeare.
Thomas Churchyard Esquier.
Thomas Nash.
Thomas Kidde.
George Peele.
Robert Greene.
Ioshua Syluester.
Nicholas Breton.
Geruase Markham.
Thomas Storer.
Robert VVilmot.
Christopher Middleton.
Richard Barnfield.
These being Moderne and extant Poets,that have liu'd together ; from many of their extant works, and some kept in priuat.
Thomas Norton Esquier
George Gascoigne Esquier
Frauncis Kindlemarsh Esquier.
Thomas Atchlow.
George VVhetstones.
These being deceased, haue left divers extant labours, and many more held back from publishing, which for the most part haue been perused, and their due right giuen here in the Muses Garden.
So we can see from the text that the first header applies to the "following" members of the nobility, and the second group that contains Edward, Earl of Oxford is under the header "From poems and workes of these noble personages extant [i.e., published]". Since all of the works from these people in this category have been taken from their PUBLISHED works, they CANNOT be the same people referred to by this header: "From diuers essayes of their Poetrie ; some extant among other Honourable personages writings ; some from privat labours and translations." Instead, that refers to the group of 24 writers whose number includes Shakespeare. And the fact that Bodenham places Shakespeare and Edward de Vere in different lists shows that he understood them to be different people, contrary to the imaginary scenario in Winkler's book where Bodenham knows that Shakespeare is Edward de Vere's alias. Moreover, since "extant" merely means published (or in one instance, "alive"), it is NOT an admission that their works have been published with someone else's name on it. It just means that their works have been published alongside others, which is obviously true. It's basically the usual editor's nod to assuage the wounded feelings of anyone who wasn't included. "It's not that yours weren't worthy—they are deserving of honor too—but these are just the ones I chose."
If this kind of garbage is meant to overturn hundreds of pieces of documentary evidence, then can you blame the real Shakespeare scholars for turning a deaf ear to it?
In general, the argument is that the plays show detail knowledge of things that this mostly uneducated lower middle-class guy would not know.
Shakespeare was not lower middle-class; he was upper middle-class: his father was a skilled leather-worker who married into the local gentry and he was a prominent local figure, rising to the positions of alderman, bailiff (equivalent of mayor) of Stratford-upon-Avon, justice of the peace, and magistrate. He was hardly a rag-picker. Furthermore. when Shakespeare was 11 John Shakespeare bought two properties (tenements, gardens, and messuages) on either side of his existing house to give himself a street frontage of 90 feet. To have a house that size and to be able to maintain it, including paying the servants to maintain a house of that size, speaks of a great deal of personal wealth. As for Shakespeare's level of knowledge, one CANNOT crawl into Shakespeare's head to know what it was he knew and didn't know. Therefore, all arguments based on what Shakespeare 'didn't know' are premised on pure speculation.
The plays are full of court protocol....
Are they? Can you cite any examples? This is one of those instances where the presentist ignorance of Shakespeare authorship deniers is the foundation of the entire argument. They assume because Shakepeare's witty, bantering aristocrats seem brilliantly true to life that they are, in fact, depictions of the real thing, and Shakespeare is denied credit for writing his own plays because he wrote too much like himself! In reality, there is hardly anything that seems convincing about his aristocrats when evaluated against the daily experience of the real early modern toffs. They are based not on real-life models but on the comedies of John Lyly (Shakespeare authorship deniers also don't read any of his contemporaries, so they don't see these influences). Take Lord Capulet, for example. On the eve of his daughter's wedding to County Paris, he starts directing the kitchen staff like some harried Elizabethan householder out of a domestic comedy. In a REAL aristocratic household, the lord of the manor would have given direction to the steward, who would have passed word to the butler, who would have then directed the kitchen staff (the butler's domain being the kitchen and dining room). Eventually Shakespeare did learn about the steward—Malvolio is one in Twelfth Night—but he is given nothing to do but the menial task of 'returning' a ring, which would have been beneath him and would have risked a domestic crisis erupting that he wasn't there to handle, and telling off Sir Toby and Sir Andrew in a way that no servant, no matter how provoked, would have ever addressed two knights.
More evidence that Shakespeare didn't know anything about court protocol lies in the fact that of all his plays, the ONLY one that makes dramatic use of the antechamber, where courtiers waited to be admitted to the presence chamber, is Henry VIII. Archbishop Cranmer is snubbed by the Privy Council and made to cool his heels in the antechamber—in a scene Shakespeare didn't even write; it was penned by his collaborator, John Fletcher. Fletcher was the son of the Bishop of London and Queen Elizabeth's personal chaplain, Richard Fletcher. HE knew court protocol.
The fact of collaboration is also damning to the Oxfordian case because John Fletcher had no dramatic career until AFTER Edward de Vere was dead. His first play, presented when he was 24/25, was The Woman-Hater (1607), authored with Francis Beaumont. How was he supposed to have written Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Cardenio (which survives in Lewis Theobald's adaptation Double Falsehood) with a man who was dead? And one wonders how de Vere could have read Don Quixote, Part 1, the source of Cardenio/Double Falsehood, since it wasn't published anywhere in the world until 1605 and not until 1612 in Thomas Shelton's English translation. The common Oxfordian excuse is that Oxford left unfinished plays that were completed by other writers, but a simple look at the distribution of scenes in Henry VIII is enough to put paid to that:
Shakespeare: Act I, scenes i and ii; II,iii and iv; III,ii, lines 1–203 (to exit of King); V,i.
Fletcher: Prologue; I,iii and iv; II,i and ii; III,i, and ii, 203–458 (after exit of King); IV,i and ii; V ii–v; Epilogue.
One must believe that de Vere wrote the first two scenes of Act I, then skipped over the other half of the act and the first half of Act II, skipped the first scene of Act III and only wrote half of the second, skipped Act IV entirely, then took up his pen again to only write the first scene of Act V. Who would do that?
But I digress.
Finally, an absolutely killer argument against the notion that the author was any sort of nobleman comes from Richard III. In Act II, sc. 1, Edward IV is making peace among the various factions in his court, and Richard (still Duke of Gloucester at this point) goes around insincerely glad-handing his enemies. As part of this forced accord, he greets "Lord Rivers" and then "Lord Woodville" and immediately thereafter "Lord Scales". The problem here is that all THREE of these people were, at the time, the SAME PERSON: Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers, who also enjoyed the subsidiary style of Lord Scales due to his marriage with Elizabeth Scales, 8th Baroness Scales. Now, admittedly, Shakespeare wasn't always the most consistent about chronology, so when he used the term Lord Rivers, he might have meant the 3rd Earl, his younger brother Richard Woodville. After Anthony's death, the title of Lord Scales and the lands attached to the title passed to Edward Woodville.
Part 2:However, that only solves the problem of why there is a Lord Rivers and a Lord Scales; it doesn't solve the Lord Woodville problem. Shakespeare was dividing one person into either two or three parts because he didn't understand that the noble title could differ from the family name and the title could have subsidiary styles. Would Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, Viscount Bulbeck, Lord Escales and Lord Badlesmere make such an egregious error? I doubt it. Nor would the 1st Viscount St. Alban, Francis Bacon.
details of Italian cities
Shakespeare misses more details than he gets right, and there are times when he obviously doesn't care about the details at all. For example, he set two plays partly in Verona: The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Romeo and Juliet. In Two Gentlemen, he sends Proteus and Valentine off to greet their "emperor", which implied that Verona was a vassal city-state of Milan. It was not. It was a vassal city-state of the Venetian Republic. Moreover, the local ruler in Milan was not the duke, because the last local duke in Milan was Francesco II Sforza, who died in 1535. After his death, Milan got kicked around the noble houses of Europe until it became a possession of the Spanish Hapsburgs. So when Shakespeare was writing, the Duke of Milan was not to be found in Milan but Madrid, reigning as Felipe II. This also casts a sidelight on The Tempest, where Prospero neglects to mention that he was the King of Spain and he seems obsessed only with the loss of one of his minor titles. (Incidentally, both Two Gentlemen and The Tempest treat Milan as if it were a coastal city, which it is not.) But in Romeo and Juliet, what was formerly a vassal state of Milan is now an independent prncipality (it was NEVER a principality), whose prince, Escalus, is a speaking character in the play. This should go to show that Shakespeare didn't give a damn about accuracy in his Italian settings, and such accurate details as actually exist in the plays and are not fantasized into the plays by anti-Shakespearians are merely accidental at best. Ben Jonson and John Webster were both more accurate in their depictions of Italy, but nobody thinks they had to go on the Grand Tour.
sophisticated legal knowledge, and much more.
What "sophisticated legal knowledge" is there in the plays and poems? Can you be specific, and show that it was significantly greater than the average degree of knowledge shown by contemporary playwrights? In fact, when the subject has been studied by scholars like Paul S. Clarkson and Clyde T. Warren in their The Law of Property in Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Drama, George W. Keeton's Shakespeare's Legal and Political Background, and so on, the consensus has been that Shakespeare's legal knowledge was only middling at best, neither as great as many of his contemporaries nor the lowest on record. The era was one of widespread familiarity with the law, because the law courts were places of public resort. People enjoyed watching cases being conducted just as much as they enjoy legal procedurals like the Law & Order franchise today. So MOST playwrights sprinkled legal allusions into their works. Some were better at it than others (e.g., the aforementioned John Webster, who may be the same John Webster who was admitted to the Middle Temple of the Inns of Court—there's more legal detail in his The Devil's Law-Case than there is in the entire Shakespeare corpus—and I've read both multiple times, so I know).
Now, with colleagues like Webster and John Marston who had studied law, or like Thomas Kyd had been legal clerks, we already have a pathway for Shakespeare to learn about the law. Another way is through his father, who was both a justice of the peace and a magistrate in Stratford-upon-Avon. A third way is through the allegedly "litigious" Shakespeare's legal experience: the majority of Shakespeare's legal allusions are to money lending, buying land, and wills. Where does he show up in the legal record? In cases dealing with money lending, in the buying of land and property, and in his will. They smear him as "litigious" but won't admit that his experiences with the law could have taught him anything. We know that students from the Inns of Court frequently attended plays and that they had The Comedy of Errors performed for the 1594 Christmas Revels. So what price Shakespeare just talking to one of these law students? Finally, there were legal books in print (and one of the books Shakespeare may have left his signature on is of that character: Archainomia by William Lambarde) and Shakespeare could have certainly read them. The deniers make much of the fact that Plowden's Commentaries was in "Law French", as if that constitutes an insuperable barrier, but Ben Jonson read Plowden for The Case is Altered, and if he could do it, so could Shakespeare. They won't tell you that Shakespeare took a hand in the marriage negotiations between his French landlords, the Mountjoy family, and another French Huguenot refugee, Stephen Bellot, so his French was presumably up to the job. Also "Law French" is not French but Anglo-Norman: the language combination that birthed Middle English. Shakespeare would have been naturally better positioned, by being only a few decades out from the widespread use of Middle English, to understand Plowden than any modern person would.
On the other hand, both DeVere and Bacon did have firsthand knowledge of these subjects.
Did they? It's true that de Vere went to Italy, but Bacon didn't. He only got as far as France in the company of Sir Amyas Paulet. And while Bacon was a lawyer, de Vere was NOT one. He made crude errors in his legal Latin in his letters, he was the only one of the four wards of William Cecil at the time to NOT buy law books, and only ONE of Cecil's wards, William Carr, paid chambers rent and so seemed like he was making a serious go of being a lawyer. While de Vere was given a courtesy admission to Gray's Inn, that was a gesture extended to numerous members of the aristocracy in the days before the Restoration-era gentlemen's clubs like White's. They would go there to dine and while away the hours, but they were expressly not there to study.
I have always been dubious about these theories. If Shakespeare was so limited, wouldn't all of his friends and acquaintances know he couldn't have written the plays? Wouldn't somebody have said something? Why exactly would DeVere, Bacon or anyone else have written these beautiful plays and arranged to never get credit for them, even in death? How would somebody as busy and active as DeVere or Bacon, or anyone else, have the time to life a full, complicated, active life and have time to write 38 plays on the side.
But these are very good questions. Did Winkler's book answer any of them for you? Does she address why nobody said something? With respect to de Vere, they called him a murderer, a traitor, a necromancer, a sodomite, an atheist, etc., etc., etc. The idea that they would have been reticent about adding the word "playwright" is silly. Did any of them provide reasons why the alleged conspiracy of silence had to be kept up after death? Granted, Bacon was still alive in 1623 when the First Folio was printed (de Vere had been dead 19 years), but he was dead by the time Ben Jonson's Timber, or Discoveries was printed in 1641 (as was Jonson himself) with its essays on both Shakespeare AND Francis Bacon, so this seems like it would have been the perfect time for admitting that they were one and the same. Instead, Jonson treats them as two distinct individuals. And yes, the question about time is a very pertinent one. So is the question about motivation: what REASON would they have had for doing something as difficult as writing plays around the strengths and requirements of a specific theatre company neither of them had any connection with when, if they wanted to write dramas, the genre of closet drama was both more respected and easier to write? It can't have been for the money, because what a freelance playwright made for a solo-authored play (around £6 at the turn of the 17th century) wouldn't have kept old Ned de Vere in scented gloves for a week.
I will admit that the pile of evidence in this book has made me less certain.
But what evidence did she actually provide? Did she show that any publication or publication record (the Stationers' Register, for example) attributed the work to anyone other than Shakespeare? Did she show that anyone explicitly stated that Shakespeare didn't write the works and [insert other name here] did? Or did she simply plagiarize the speculative claims of anti-Shakespearians, the specious and cherry-picked "biographical parallels", and the motivated readings of texts that very often had absolutely nothing to do with Shakespeare? Which conclusion follows naturally from the evidence and which is an attempt to argue AROUND the evidence that they cannot avoid?
No one identified Shakspere as the author during his lifetime.
This is a lie, and even if it were true, so what? What magic property does his lifetime hold that people would forget his very existence and everything he did the instant he died, even if they'd been twenty or more years in the same company that William Shakespeare was, like John Heminges, Henry Condell, and John Lowin?
If you want to argue that the identification of the author must be spelled "Shakspere", then Richard Stonley's note of his purchase of Venus and Adonis all the way back in 1593 qualifies. The equivalent spelling "Shakspeare" is in William Covell's Polimanteia, The Return from Parnassus, Part 1, the epistle to Bel-Vedére, or The Garden of the Muses by John Bodenham, the broadside ballad "A Mourneful Dittie, entituled Elizabeths Loss", Myrrha, the Mother of Adonis by William Barksted, and on two title pages of canonical works: the first quarto (1608) of King Lear (where it is spelled "Shak-speare", but the hyphen doesn't change the spelling), and on the first quarto (1634) of The Two Noble Kinsmen. On both quartos Shakespeare is given the honorific appertaining to a gentleman: M. or Mr. The latter quarto also identifies him directly as "gent." This is another identifier of William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon because the only man to whom the term applied was the one whose father, John Shakespeare, had been given a coat of arms in 1596 for his services in various "offices of honour" in Stratford-upon-Avon (the qualifying offices John Shakespeare had served in were bailiff—the equivalent of mayor—justice of the peace, and magistrate). He was also identified with the honorifics appertaining to a gentlemen in the Stationer's Register. For example, the 23 August 1600 entry reads:
Andrewe Wyse Willm Aspley
Entred for their copies vnder the handes of the wardens Two bookes. the one called: Muche a Doo about nothinge. The other the second parte of the history of kinge Henry the IIIJth with the humours of Sir John Ffallstaff : Wrytten by Mr Shakespere
And Edmund Howes' additions to John Stow's Annals contains a list of Elizabethan writers ordered "according to their priorities" (i.e., according to their social rank) wherein "M. Willi. Shakespeare, gentleman" comes right below "M. William Warner gentleman" and above "Samuel Daniell Esquire". This link of Shakespeare with his rank of gentleman shows yet again that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was uniquely intended.
His daughter's husband kept detailed diaries, that mentioned Michael Drayton as an "excellent poet," but was silent about Shakspere as an alleged author.
And you know as well as I do that those so-called "detailed diaries" were medical case notes, not a "Dear diary, had a chat with stepdad about the Bankside theatre scene. Oh, the stories he can tell of Richard Burbage!" Drayton is in Hall's case notes because he treated Drayton. They also were NOT comprehensive, as Dr. John Hall tended to only document his successes. Finally, the only surviving book of his case notes has no entries dated earlier than 1617. Though internal evidence does show some undated entries may be as early as 1615, it's still MOSTLY OUTSIDE Shakespeare's lifetime and there is no evidence that anyone can supply that Shakespeare was treated by Hall in the final two calendar years of his life, nor that, if he were, the treatment was successful, since it was his successes he was interested in documenting. In fact, his death rather suggests that the medical intervention was UNSUCCESSFUL.
Court insiders knew Oxford wrote the plays, and that he wanted to remain anonymous (as recorded in the anonymous 1589 Art of English Poesie).
And as you already know, because I've told you, The Arte of English Poesie says no such thing. Instead, Edward de Vere is identified in a list of KNOWN authors. There is also nothing to suggest that he was known as the author of "THE plays", as you put it, since the book was published in 1589 before or at most during Shakespeare's earliest career as an author. How was the author of this book supposed to have known that Oxford was Shakespeare when there was no Shakespeare who was a public figure yet? Furthermore, the author does NOT identify Edward de Vere as an author of plays, but rather identifies "Th'Earle of Oxford and Maister Edwardes of her Maiesties Chappell for Comedy and Enterlude". Edwardes wrote NO known interludes and only ONE known comedy, Damon and Pithias, therefore the interlude-writer was Edward de Vere, and he may have been mentioned possibly on the strength of just one interlude. We know he took a starring role in a shipwreck device, so that may be the only reason he has for being mentioned at all. It certainly does not establish that Edward de Vere secretly wrote all of the Shakespeare corpus. Nor do we have any reason to believe he wrote his own shipwreck device when he had two playwrights, Anthony Munday and John Lyly, working for him as his ostensible "secretaries". That would not have been regarded as shameful or dishonest—it would have been natural that he would get the credit for his servants' work, just as if he laid on a great feast he would get the credit instead of his cook and serving staff.
Now, to return to the subject of Edward de Vere's allegedly anonymous authorship. You neglected to tell Mr. Reilly that he had already violated this alleged "tradition" by using his patronage of Thomas Beddingfield's translation of Cardanus Comforte to shove in a dreadful poem of his own under his own name. Why would he be so careless of "tradition" for his AWFUL poetry and so careful to disclaim his GOOD poetry, especially when his good poetry, published and given a suitably fawning dedication to the glorious empress Elizabeth, could have been the means to advancement at court and money that he was seeking throughout the 1590s by other means, chiefly by writing begging letters for concessions on Cornish and Devonian tin?
But I digress. A simple glance at the list of authors shows that Oxford wasn't being considered with the unknown writers, but with the "rest" who HAD published or let their manuscript works be known to be theirs.
And in her Maiesties time that now is are sprong vp an other crew of Courtly makers Noble men and Gentlemen of her Maiesties owne seruauntes, who haue written excellently well as it would appeare if their doings could be found out and made publicke with the rest, of which number is first that noble Gentleman Edward Earle of Oxford, Thomas Lord of Bukhurst, when he was young, Henry Lord Paget, Sir Philip Sydney, Sir Walter Rawleigh, Master Edward Dyar, Maister Fulke Greuell, Gascon, Britton, Turberuille and a great many other learned Gentlemen, whose names I do not omit for enuie, but to auoyde tediousnesse, and who haue deserued no little commendation. But of them all particularly this is myne opinion, that Chaucer, with Gower, Lidgat and Harding for their antiquitie ought to haue the first place....
Are you really trying to tell me that in the 16th century nobody knew that Geoffrey Chaucer was an author? And let's look at some of those other names. "Thomas Lord of Bukhurst" is Thomas Sackville, later raised to the 1st Earl of Dorset by King James. His Gorboduc, co-authored with Sir Thomas Norton, was the first blank verse tragedy in English, published in 1565 with their names on it. "Turberuille" is George Turberville, who, among other works, published this: Epitaphes, epigrams, songs, and sonets, with a discourse of the friendly affections of Tymetes to Pyndara his ladie. Newly corrected with additions and set out by George Turbervile, gentleman. Anno Domini 1567. "Gascon" is George Gascoigne. Two years before the publication of The Arte of English Poesie, this book of his came out: The Pleasauntest Workes of George Gascoigne Esquyre Newlye Compyled Into One Volume, that is to Say: His Flowers, Hearbes, Weedes, the Fruites of Warre, the Comedie Called Supposes, the Tragedie of Iocasta, the Steele Glasse, the Complaint of Phylomene, the Storie of Ferdinando Ieronimi, and the Pleasure at Kenelworth Castle. Clearly, this was NOT a list of secret authors, and you Oxfordians must LIE about the meaning of the text. The fact that you have to lie to make your case is exactly why nobody in any position of serious academic responsibility in early modern literature accepts Oxford as the author of Shakespeare's works.
My own university scolded me for my Shakespeare publications after the Times of London called me a "Shakespeare scholar."
That is because you are NOT a Shakespeare scholar; you are a psychiatrist who merely cosplays at scholarship. Yet in order to shove your Oxfordian delusions into the media cycle, you appointed yourself "Shakespeare expert for media relations" or something like that and pretended that you represented the scholarly consensus at Georgetown. Therefore the university was well within its rights to get you to stop using their name to add undeserved luster to a case you couldn't make by honest means.
Great observation about scholars saying it doesn't matter who the author was--until they go ballistic whenever someone presents evidence for an alternative author! My own university scolded me for my Shakespeare publications after the Times of London called me a "Shakespeare scholar."