By Mark Anderson for Gather.com
Everyone knows who's buried in Grant's tomb, and the color of Washington's white horse has long been agreed upon. But tautology collectors beware: Not all seeming redundancies are made equal.
Take, for instance, the simple statement "Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare." Or, to rephrase this commonplace belief more explicitly, "The Stratford-born actor Will Shakspere [as he preferred to spell his name] wrote the plays and poems often published under the hyphenated byline 'Shake-speare.'"
To this commonplace belief, many great intellectual and cultural icons — among them, Walt Whitman, Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Andre Gide, Orson Welles, Daphne du Maurier, and Derek Jacobi — have said, "No." Shakspere did not write "Shake-speare."
Why? The story, in its elemental form, begins with a piece of punctuation. Shake hyphen speare.
The 1590s and early 1600s, when the Bard's works first appeared in print, were the height of what literary historians Archer Taylor and Frederic J. Mosher called "the Golden Age of pseudonyms." Some writers who assumed literary disguises used hyphenated phrases for their pen-names, such as "Martin Mar-prelate," "Tom
Tell-truth" and "Cuthbert Curry-knave."
Here's how the author's name appeared on the title page of the first editions of Hamlet (1603), King Lear (1608), and The Sonnets (1609), respectively:
Moreover, a prominent London author named John Davies wrote a book of epigrams in 1611, one of which was titled
(1570). Here's what
Terence, this Elizabethan textbook claimed, did not write all of "Terence." The French Renaissance essayist Michel de Montaigne also advocated that one or more Roman aristocratic authors wrote "Terence" plays that had been wrongfully attributed to a performer who only enacted a public role of author.
"Shake-speare," Davies said, is "our English Terence."
Davies wasn't the only writer at the time hinting that "Shake-speare" was not the actor but rather a mask that concealed another author altogether. One poet (Richard Brathwait) wrote in 1614 that the finest plays of the Elizabethan age were "prettily shadowed in a borrowed name." Satirists named Joseph Hall and John Marston suggested that the author of a Shake-speare poem (Venus and Adonis) "shifts" his writings "to another's name." A rhetorician named Thomas Vicars in 1628 paid homage to a "famous poet who takes his name from 'shaking' and 'spear.'"
There was, as it happens, also a famous classical goddess whose name was affiliated with 'shaking' and 'spear.' Athena, divine protectress of both Athens and the arts, was said to have been born from her father Zeus's forehead, fully dressed and armed for battle. Angry, perhaps, at being brought into this world in such a strange and ungainly fashion, the goddess shook the spear that she was born carrying. Learned authors from antiquity and the Renaissance toyed with the words "shake" and "spear" as a way of tipping their hat to the legend of Athena's strange nativity.
As a reference to the classical goddess associated with the birthplace of the theater, "Shake-speare" was in fact a perfect pen-name for a playwright.
In 1612, the scholar Henry Peacham published a book of visual and verbal puzzles entitled England's Athena (Minerva Britanna). The puzzle that graced the book's title page effectively answered the question posed by the title: "So, then, who or what is 'England's Athena'?" The drawing at the center of the book's title page shows a hand emerging from behind a theatrical curtain. The hand holds a pen, and the pen is writing something on a scroll.
England's spear-shaker, the puzzle seems to suggest, was a playwright whose identity had somehow been hidden from public view.
Fortunately for posterity, Peacham provided the solution to the "Shake-speare" identity problem in the very same puzzle. The pen emerging from behind the theatrical curtain on the title page of Peacham's book spells out the following string of letters: "MENTE.VIDEBORI". The phrase is tantalizingly close to the Latin mente videbor. ("By the mind I shall be seen.") But the extra "I" ruins it. There is no Latin word or verb form videbori.
On the other hand, Minerva Britanna is a puzzle book. The words on the scroll are part of a puzzle for which "England's Minerva/Athena" appears to be a clue. If MENTE.VIDEBORI is an unintelligible jumble of characters, this could be the puzzle-maker's way of saying, "Go ahead and rearrange things. See if you can find something else!"
In The Da Vinci Code, anagrams like "O, Draconian devil! Oh, lame saint!" (Leonardo da Vinci! The Mona Lisa!) drive the plot of this best-selling potboiler through the darkened hallways of the Louvre and into the crux of a secret that author Dan Brown (and some other litigious authors before him) claims is at the core of Judeo-Christian culture.
Well, Dan Brown, eat your heart out. This historical anagram actually exists. It was printed in 1612, and these days one needn't even go to a research library to look at it. Middlebury College in Vermont has posted an electronic facsimile of Minerva Britanna on the Internet:
http://f01.middlebury.edu/fs010a/students/
Minerva Britanna's title page puzzle shoves a shaken spear at us and dares us to proceed onward. Unscramble those letters on the scroll, including the period between the two words, and the identity of "England's spear-shaker" emerges.
MENTE.VIDEBORI is, in fact, a perfect anagram for
TIBI NOM. DE VERE
Or in English: "THY NAME IS DE VERE."
Just who this "de Vere" fellow was - and why he makes such a compelling spear-shaker - will be the subject of my next essay.
Thank you for joining the journey thus far.
- Mark Anderson
July 2006
References, scholarly citations and further information about the points discussed above can be found in Mark Anderson's book "Shakespeare" By Another Name: The Life of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, The Man Who Was Shakespeare (Gotham Books, 2005), online at http://shakespearebyanothername.com.
Please join me on Wednesday, August 23rd from 1-3pm ET live on Gather.
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Comments: 18
The author of Shakespeare is playful, yet profound. He writes with lyrical beauty, yet he is a lover of truth, an unseen philosopher of the renaissance. The principal injustice the author suffers is from his admirers who, upon reading his plays, pretend to know more than they can know. One needs always to be careful when connecting the dots.
Also, thank you for the link to Minerva Britanna. It sounds incredibly interesting.
So what if the final "I" is just a blot and not an "I"--does that mean that Oxford wasn't Shake-speare? Of course not. There are many arguments in favor of Oxfordian authorship that are so much more compelling than whether there is an "I" on the end of MENTE.VIDEBOR, and if so, whether its an anagram.
I look forward to Anderson's next post.
So what if the final "I" is just a blot and not an "I"--does that mean
that Oxford wasn't Shake-speare? Of course not. There are many arguments
in favor of Oxfordian authorship that are so much more compelling than
whether there is an "I" on the end of MENTE.VIDEBOR, and if so,
whether its an anagram.
.
"MENTE.VIDEBOR" is itself an anagram for:
"DE VERE IN TOMB" ... meaning specifically
that Oxford had just been laid to rest in the
Westminster Abbey tomb of his cousin Francis Vere:
-------------------------------------------------------
http://www.westminster-abbey.org/library/burial/vere.htm
.
<<Sir Francis Vere (1560-1609) and his brother Horace (1565-1635)
are buried in the chapel of St John the Evangelist in the Abbey.
Francis has a large monument of alabaster and black marble
showing him lying on a carved rush mattress in civilian dress
under a slab on which is laid out his suit of armour.
.
. The slab is supported on the shoulders of four life-sized
. knights in armour who kneel at each corner.>>
.
http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/Images/vere01.JPG
....................................................
. For.Let foure Captaines
. Beare Hamlet like a souldier to the stage,
.
http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/55comm.htm
------------------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer
Thanks
Howard
http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/virtualclassroom/MinervaBritanna.htm
Executive summary: Peacham was playing with the fact that he'd only written a "half-I" on the title page. He wanted, it would appear, to say both "By the mind I shall be seen" *and* "Thy name is de Vere." But the problem is one phrase, in Latin, is eleven characters and the other is twelve. So how to say both? Well, you split the difference. You depict a pen that's only halfway through the process of writing the letter "I."
There's a lot more to the story, including a puzzle with the heading "Lord Vere" that jokes about a missing "I." It demonstrates why Minerva Britanna is considered one of the most complex and sophisticated puzzle books of the period.
As I say in Essay 2 in this series, there are definitely ways to second-guess the present solution to the title-page puzzle to Minerva Britanna. And, fortunately, it's just one very very small piece of a big and rewarding larger puzzle -- i.e. the Shakespeare mystery at large and the solution of Edward de Vere.
To Howard S. and to anyone else who would like the citations on these essays, which are all adapted from Shakespeare By Another Name, the easiest and quickest way is to full-text search the book, which you can do on the book's website:
http://shakespearebyanothername.com
Just click on the book's image that says "search inside." That will take you to an amazon.com page that allows you to full text search for any word or phrase. Searching for the word "Brathwait," for instance, yields the citation Howard requested:
*A Strappado for the Divell* (London, 1615) II. 85-93.
It's worth looking up the citation online as discussed above, though, because there's more to this story that's discussed at length in the endnote.
You are absolutely right that Brathwait says that he recalls those glory days when "swains so young" performed some gloroius, glorious works -- presumably those greatest works of the Elizabethan period. i.e. Shakespeare's. But I would also hasten to point out Brathwait's closing line:
"And long may England's thespian springs be known."
Brathwait, in other words, is memorializing the "springs," the place of *origin,* of these superlative Elizabethan plays in question. He's not saying that the very best Elizabethan plays reached their final artistic expression with children's companies. But, rather, that at least some of these plays "sprang" from children's company repertoires.
Now I grant you that conventional Shakespeare scholarship does not allow for much of any apprenticeship for the Bard's works. He just wrote plays, we are told, and those plays were staged, and then he went on to write more and better plays.
That model, I'm saying, is wrong.
Oxfordians have, instead, long argued that orthodox scholars have been missing a large chunk of the Bard's
story by concentrating only on the 1590s -- when it was known that Shakspere of Stratford was in London.
Indeed, much of the story of Shakespeare By Another Name concerns 1570s and '80s, when I argue that early drafts of what later became mature versions of Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, etc. were performed by many different theatrical companies -- including children's troupes.
De Vere, for one, was known to have staged a number of plays (now supposedly lost) using children's troupes during the 1580s. One of those plays we have the title for. It was called "The History of Agamemnon and Ulysses." (On pp. 200-206 of Shakespeare By Another Name, I discuss this story.) As I argue on pp. 200-06, the Agamemnon and Ulysses dialogues in Shakespeare's play *Troilus and Cressida* in fact make a perfect fit with the historical facts surrounding the performance of "A History of Agamemnon and Ulysses" by the Earl of Oxford's Boys.
Now before people start tittering about the fact that we're discussing a children's (i.e. boys') troupe, I need to point out one further fact: Many top playwrights of the time used companies of child actors, especially when their material was particularly satirical or topical. An adult actor calling the queen of England, say, a fickle tease or a self-righteous Jezebel could have wound up in the Tower of London.
But how about giving those same lines to a 12-year-old boy? A playwright making a satirical joke about a powerful member of court was able to get away with a lot more using child actors. Today, of course, we can't imagine how a self-respecting, professional playwright would want to hand off his precious work to a bunch of kids. But in late 16th century England, this ploy was commonplace -- again, especially for a playwright who was trying to say something particularly controversial and not get in trouble for saying it!
There are whole books written about the history of children's troupes in the Elizabethan period that discuss this very fact in depth. (e.g. Michael Shapiro, The Children of the Revels, Columbia U. Press, 1977)
So, bottom line: What's Brathwait saying?
Two things, essentially:
1) The finest plays of the Elizabethan age were performed under a "borrowed name"
2) Those plays originated in companies of children.
The problem with getting into point 2) is that it requires not a little bit of Elizabethan theatrical history, as the digressions above might suggest, to apprehend the context of Brathwait's words.
I wanted to keep Brathwait's quote simple, so I skipped point 2) in the essay at the top of this page. But Brathwait's words in fact become even more pointed when one looks at the whole of his remarks.
Again, it suggests that not only was "Shake-speare" a mask concealing a politically controversial playwright -- but also that this playwright's works enjoyed a long period of apprenticeship that involved, among other things, stints in the repertoire of Elizabethan childrens' companies.
It's all self-consistent with de Vere as "Shakespeare." With Shakspere as the author, however, none of it adds up. And that explains, I think, why Brathwait's words have remained in obscurity for as long as they have.
http://www.willitsnews.com/people/ci_4137308
HOT TICKETS
By The Willits News staff
Theatre
A Midsummer's Night's Dream, by Edward De Vere (aka William Shake-speare) playing at Ukiah Players Theatre. Special outdoor performances on bleachers, outside on the lawn in front of the famous playhouse. Please bring cushion! Playing at 8 PM, Thurs, Fri and Sat evenings from July 20 thru August 5. Call UPT at 462-9226 to reserve tickets.
Who do you know in Willits?
Howard
1) First off, let's not lose the general point: Elizabethan and Jacobean *authors* used pseudonyms all the time. To suggest that "Shakespeare" (hyphenated or no) was a literary disguise is suggesting that the author of these plays joined many, many, many of his contemporaries in publishing works incognito.
There are over 6000 entries in Halkett and Laing's *Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publications in the English Language, 1475-1640*. Granted, most entries in Halkett and Laing are initials. Yet, even just signing one's written work with one's initials accords one a degree of comfortable distance from those writings. Allows a writer a little more room to take a few more risks than if his or her full name were attached to the text. Wouldn't you agree, Mr. or Ms. L.?
But it is simply incorrect to assert that no playwrights of the period used pen-names. To cite just a few examples: Thomas Dekker published under the pseudonym "Some-body" [sic]; John Lyly published under "Double V"; Thomas Nashe took the pen-name "Adam Fouleweather, student in asse-tronomony" [sic], among a number of literary disguises; Anthony Munday published under many pen-names as well, such as "M.S," "Edward [sic] Spenser" and "Simon Smel-knave, student in good felowship."
2) Hm. This new rule about pseudonyms needing to reveal "the writer's goal"? So how about, say, picking out some example pen-names under the letter "C" in Halkett and Laing: "Clonnico del Mondo Snuffe"'; "Cornu-apes"; "Corymboeus"; "Clitus-Alexandrinus"; "Charles Rickets." It seems these authors-in-disguise didn't get the memo.
3) The hyphen as printer's device. OK. There seems to be a microscopic focus at work here that needs to be pulled back. It would be absurd to argue based on the hyphen alone that "Shake-speare" was a pen-name. That's not the point. It is certainly interesting, I think, that the hyphen was used to delineate an action that was associated with the goddess affiliated with the classical birthplace of the theater (below). It's also interesting that in 1578 the Cambridge professor Gabriel Harvey addressed Edward de Vere in Latin in words that one may plausibly translate to "Thine eyes flash fire, thy will shakes spears." (The citations for this translation are in my book.) It's a place to start.
4-6) A.R.L. is absolutely right here. Looking back, I should have chosen a different word than "textbook" to describe *The Schoolmaster.* But again. Forest for the trees. If Ascham is for arbitrary reasons thrown out as credible evidence, then how about Cicero: "They used to ascribe [Terence's] plays to Laelius"
Or Quintilian: "They used to credit [Terence's plays] to Scipio"
Or Montaigne: "And could the perfection of eloquence have added a lustre suitable to a great personage, certainly Scipio and Laelius had never resigned the honour of their comedies, with all the luxuriances and elegances of the Latin tongue, to an African slave; for that the work was theirs, its beauty and excellence sufficiently declare; Terence himself confesses as much, and I should take it ill from any one that would dispossess me of that belief."
The fact is that to a learned early 17th century reader of Davies epigram, saying that "Shake-speare" is "our English Terence" carried the baggage of these great ancients and contemporaries who all said Terence was an actor who DID NOT write works that had been ascribed to him.
7-9) Again, A.R.L. is just plain wrong. Very wrong, in this case. I hand the microphone over to a brilliant colleague named Christopher Paul who in 2003 posted example after example of 16th and 17th century writers who referenced Athena/Minerva/Pallas by her signature action of spear-shaking.
http://tinyurl.com/n5rcw
Shakespeare By Another Name's endnotes also provide examples to this effect, but not as many as Chris cites.
And again, the reason any of this matters is that it becomes clear that "Shake-speare" or "Shakespeare" would have been seen by learned Elizabethan and Jacobean readers as a clever tip of the hat to Athena -- the goddess, not of the theater, but as I noted above, of the classical birthplace of the theater: Athens.
The citation here, again, is in Shakespeare By Another Name. [Athena: A Biography by Lee Hall (Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1997) pp. 31ff.]
And ALL OF THIS is some pretty small beer compared to the enormous amount of biographical and literary evidence that points to Edward de Vere as the author of Hamlet and King Lear and The Sonnets, etc....
That material is touched upon in Essay Two, which, dear and very patient reader, I urge you to proceed onward toward...
Thank you.
.....................................
<<But it is simply incorrect to assert that no playwrights of the period used pen-names. To cite just a few examples: Thomas Dekker published under the pseudonym "Some-body" [sic]; John Lyly published under "Double V"; Thomas Nashe took the pen-name "Adam Fouleweather, student in asse-tronomony" [sic], among a number of literary disguises; Anthony Munday published under many pen-names as well, such as "M.S," "Edward [sic] Spenser" and "Simon Smel-knave, student in good felowship.">>
--------------------------------------------------------
_Isaac Asimov's Book of Facts_ :
--------------------------------------------------------
<<The poems and plays of the greatest writer in English literature
have been attributed to more than twenty persons. William Shakespeare
would have been startled by the names of those who are supposed
to have done his writing for him - including Fracis Bacon,
Sir Walter Raleigh, and Queen Elizabeth.>> p.203
<<Six popular books of science fiction for high school students published under the pseudonym Paul French were written by Isaac Asimov.>> p.206
...............................................................
(Paul French would have been startled by the names of
those who are supposed to have done his writing for him!)
...............................................................
<<During the Elizabethan age, plays were usually printed without
credit to the author. All of Christoper Marlowe's plays that were printed in his lifetime, for example, appeared anonymously.>> p.434
<<There are songs in all of Shakespeare's plays
except _The Comedy of Errors_ >>p.440
<<One of the most popular and important playwrights
in the Elizabethan age was Thomas Watson.
Not a single one of his dramas exists today.>> p.212
www.sirbacon.org/harneroxford.htm
Ben Jonson did work and live with Francis Bacon after 1621 and they prepared the First Folio together. This took place 17 years after Devere's death when many revisions appear for the first time including some added plays. Jonson made great tributes to Bacon almost verbatim as the tributes he made of Shakespeare.
The sonnets also reveal a man who is "in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes", "made lame by fortune's dearest spite" He says, "For I am shamed by that which I bring forth". Nothing in Bacon's biography suggests a fit with these sentiments and Bacon never claimed any credit for the works even though he lived until 1626. In addition we only have one poem ascribed ascribed to Bacon "The Fate of Man" and it shows no resemblance to Shakespeare's style or eloquence.
For example, Example of Bacon's "poetry"
The World's a Globe of State
The world's a globe of state, our life a reign,
Man sovereign:
Begat with pleasure, and brought up in days
With sports and plays;
Courted while youthful, and when riper yeared
Honoured and feared.
Who on this rock doth stand, or ocean steer,
Rests in his Centre, moves as in his sphere."
Another problem, the Folio clearly states in the preface that the author known as Shakespeare is dead. It seems highly unlikely that if the author was indeed Bacon and he was still alive at the time, he would have stood silent while 36 of his plays were published with thousands of printing errors. Equally puzzling is his role in the trial of Essex. Although compelled to play a role he attacked the role as prosecutor with a viciousness that condoned and even recommended torture to extract a confession. This could not be the same man who adored the Earl of Southampton and whose life showed a humane and forgiving soul.
According to author Edmund Whipple, "Every critic who has the slightest discernment of spirits must know that the mental processes of Shakspeare and Bacon are fundamentally different, -- a difference which goes deep down into vital sources of individual genius. Shakspeare individualizes the results of his knowledge, Bacon generalizes the results of his. The mind of Shakspeare darts to conclusions; the mind of Bacon moves to them with a gravity worth of a lord chancellor. Both are men large reason, large understanding, large imagination, large individuality; but the are different not only in degree, but in kind. It would be impossible for any intelligent critic to reconcile a really characteristic work of Shakspeare with really characteristic work of Bacon. The mental processes of the two men are radically dissimilar. "
Bacon was commanded to prosecute Essex. He was politically coerced, and would have faced prison for disobeying the royal command.It was a perfectly hatched plot by the Cecils to checkmate the Tudor dynasty. You should read, The History of a Character Assassination by Nieves Mathews, Yale Press, which exonerates Bacon from the false rumor that he recommended torture.
THis page illustrates Bacon's biographical connection to the Sonnets
http://www.sirbacon.org/Sonnet/sonnets.htm
For more connection to Bacon as Shakespeare :
http://www.sirbacon.org/links/evidence.htm
This page demonstrates Bacon's mind saturated with the mechanics of the stage throughout his writing career.
http://www.sirbacon.org/leithbaconstage.htm
And *yet*, this poses the question Alan asked. Which came first? As is noted in *Shakespeare By Another Name* (pp. 139-40), "It must be one of the great coincidences of Western literature that Harvey's 1578 encomium would reference the very name the earl of Oxford would one day use to conceal his own writings."
This is one coincidence that I, for one, can live with.
And coincidence must inevitably flex its muscles here, too, because Harvey's words were uttered in 1578, and at that time, the Stratford actor was just an unknown 14-year-old kid in the provinces. (Remember, the "Lost Years" for Shakspere don't begin till several years later.)
It's a fascinating footnote to de Vere's life, I feel. But ultimately just that.