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Sunday, August 27, 2017

A Poem by Mr. W.H.

William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke
Standard Citation: Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “A Poem by Mr. W.H.Virtual Grub Street. 27 August 2017.

For those of us who understand William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, to likely have been the “Mr. W.H.” of the sonnets, it can only be a disappointment that so little is known about him.  He was close to marrying Edward de Vere’s daughter, Bridget, at one time (before he had ascended to the Earldom).  Her father being a bankrupt (more or less), her grandfather William Cecil, Baron of Burghley, was responsible for her dowry.  He was near death and apparently tried to convince the Herberts to accept Bridget’s inheritance as dowry.  The offer proved unacceptable.

Herbert is said to have sworn off marriage.  Some two years later we learn from Bridget’s uncle, Robert Cecil, that young Herbert has been sowing his wild oats:

We haue no newes but that there is a misfortune befiallen Mistris Fitton,‘ for she is proved with chyld, and the E. of Pembrooke beinge examyned confesseth a ffact, but vtterly renounceth all marriage. I feare they will both dwell in the Tower awhyle, for the Queen hath vowed to send them thether.[1]

Some have theorized that Herbert was the recipient of the so-called “Fair Youth” sonnets and Mary Fitton the Dark Lady.



He did marry, however.  For money, we are informed by Anthony á Wood.

He indulged to himself the pleasures of all kinds, almost in all excesses. To women, whether out of his natural constitution, or for want of his domestic content, and delight (in which he was most unhappy, for he paid much too dear for his wife's fortune, by taking her person into the bargain) he was immoderately given up.[2]

His poetry and trail of illegitimate children makes clear that he saw the arrangement as no inconvenience to his love life.  His wife sought solace in her social life and spent the occasional morning at the breakfast table with Ben Jonson among her cultured guests.

Herbert's poems definitely reveal a charmer.  They make clear that the ladies could have wit, suave compliment and propinquity to power for as long as they could hang onto it.  This for just one instance:

“Of a fair Gentlewoman scarce Marriageable.”[3]

WHy should Passion lead thee blind,
Cause thy Lydia proves unkind:
She is too young to know delight,
And is not plum'd for Cupid's flight:
She cannot yet in heighth of pleasure,
Pay her Love with equal measure;
But like a Rose new blown, doth feed
The Eye alone, but yeilds no Seed.
She is yet but in her Spring,
And bears no Fruit till Cupid bring
A hotter season with his Fire,
Which soon will ripen her desire:
Autumn will shortly come and greet her,
Making her taste and colour sweeter;
And then her ripeness will be such,
That she will fall e'ne with a touch.

In amongst it all, Mr. W.H. found the time to run interference in behalf the First Folio of the plays of Shakespeare.[4]  The Folio was dedicated to he and his brother (the husband of Edward de Vere’s daughter Susan).






[1] Cecil, Robert.  Letters from Sir Robert Cecil to Sir George Carew, Ed. John Maclean (Westminster: Camden Society, 1864), 65.
[2] Wood, Anthony.  Athenae Oxonienses (1815),  II. 484.
[3] Herbert, William.  3rd Earl of Pembroke.  Poems written by the Right Honorable William earl of Pembroke, lord steward of his Majesties houshold. Whereof many of which are answered by way of repartee, by Sr Benjamin Ruddier, knight. With several distinct poems, written by them occasionally, and apart (London, 1660). 76
[4] Purdy, Gilbert Wesley.  Edward de Vere was Shakespeare: at long last the proof (Richmond, VA: The Virtual Vanaprastha, 2013), iii.


  • Desperately Seeking Bridget (de Vere).  "Even most people who assert that the Earl of Oxford was the poet and playwright Shake-speare (a group to which I resoundingly belong) do not seem to know that she was engaged, in 1598, to William Herbert, soon to inherit the Earldom of Pembroke,..."


Monday, August 07, 2017

Falstaff's Sack (p. 3)

most important example of sack in the plays of Shakespeare.

For derivation, a more satisfactory one is implied in the early dictionaries. W. Rider, 1589, has “Vinum Hispanense saccatum, sacke, or rumney”: and “Sacke, a wine that cometh out of Spaine. Vinum Hispanense.” “ Sack ” from saccatus is hard to avoid. Saccatus is “ Put in a Sacke ” in Rider, from which one might believe in a reference to the Spanish wine-bags known as borrachios. But the earlier dictionary, The Nomenclator (1585) is most explicit: “ Vinum saccatum ... sackt wine, or wine strained through a bag, hippocras.” It appears to have been a part of the winemaker’s business to strain wines in early times, and the word sack may thus have come to us through the Latin saccatus. In Holland’s Plinie, xxiii. r (p. 153), I find again corroboration: ‘ ‘Howbeit to speake generally, the wholesomest wines both of the one sort and the other, and for all persons, be such as have run through a strainer or Ipocras bag, and thereby lost some part of their strength.” Sack was a strong, hot, Spanish wine, in need of sugar, and improved by a reduction in its strength, whether by burning or straining. For “burnt wine,” see also Dicke of Devonshire (Bullen’s Old Plays, ii. 36): “Like wine that’s burnt, you must be set light by, and then you’ll come to a temper.” Dekker has “he ... commands a gallon of sacke and suger to be burnt for the yeamen,” Jests to make you Merrie (Gros. 11. 349), 1607.

Again, Mr. Hart is entirely correct that the reader will find many conflicting texts concerning sack.  We are (I hope) in the process of teasing a single truth from them.  First, Dicke of Devonshire properly informs us that every kind of wine was burnt not only sack.  Sack itself is a specific wine apart from any burning it may undergo. 




“Burnt sack” is a sack that has been prepared in a certain way after the product has been purchased.  Burnt or unburnt it remains sack just as Merlot wine is Merlot whether or not it has been mulled.  And one type of burning is not identical to another.  In France and Italy, mulled wine is traditionally called vin brulé (burnt wine) and is older than Pliny (who, however, was not describing it in Hart’s quotes from Holland’s translation).  In Shakespeare and other writers of the time, burnt sack clearly only involves adding sugar.  Mulling, on the other hand, generally includes a variety of spices.

Having downloaded my own searchable copy of Holland’s Plinie through the miracle of the Internet, I can improve upon Hart’s choice of quotations.  His refer to the common processes of finishing wines, which is quite a different thing from mulling or burning a finished wine.  In Book 14, Chapter xvi, page 420, Pliny is actually talking about mulled wines.

I find also, that they used to make a kind of spiced wine or Ipocras, not for sweet perfumes and ointments onely, but also for to drinke….  Much after the same manner we spice our wines now adaies also but that we adde pepper and honey thereto : which some call Gondite, others Pepper-wines….  Now the order [recipe] of it is to take of the root fortie drams to six Sextars of Must or new wine, and hang it in a cloth togither with a weight [of spices], in manner above said.

The “cloth” is the sack that Mr. Hart asserts gives us the name of “sack”.

But Falstaff’s favorite kind of sack is “sherrie sack” and it is this that tells us what was sack.  Sherry is the demotic 15th century English pronunciation of “Jerez,” the region of Spain in which the distinctive wine is produced.  What makes the wine so distinctive is not its grapes but the way it is produced.  First, it is fermented longer than other wines until all of the sugars are fermented away and only the astringent (dry) taste of the tannin remains.  This, of course, is the very definition of a “dry” wine, and “sack” is the demotic 15th century English pronunciation of “secco” or “sec”.  Thus “sherrie sack”.


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Falstaff's Sack (p. 4)

But why buy a dry wine only to put sugar in it afterwards?  This was done because there is a final step to making sherry.  Brandy is added in order to increase the alcohol content.  It is the potency of sack that Falstaff praises.  In time, sack drinkers learned that one could boil sugar into it and both increase the alcohol content still further and get rid of the bitter taste of the tannin.  Thus “burnt sack”.

As Hart makes clear, straining wine through a sack tends to reduce the potency of a wine.  This is just the opposite of what Falstaff and his ilk sought.  No doubt there was plenty of straining out dregs in the wine industry.  Perhaps the result was even called a “sacked wine” in certain circles.  But it is a misapprehension to think that this gives the name to sack wines.  In the same line, the entry in the Dictionnaire de l’Academie stating that “sec” referred to wines without liquor added is not to our point.  Again, Falstaff wanted potency and sherry is fortified with brandy thus supplying his want.  But it is “sack” by virtue of the fact that all of the sugar is fermented away (the traditional definition of a “dry” wine) leaving the astringent (dry) taste of tannin. 



This leaves us with just one further question to answer.  Why were so many other wines than sherry called sack?  The likely answers are: 1) there are other dry wines than sherry; 2) other wines both wet and dry may have been fortified with alcohol in order to better compete for customers and in this manner “sack” began to be used for “fortified wine” in general parlance; 3) many other wines were advertised as “sack” regardless that they had none of the qualities of fortified dry wine because they could be more easily sold for more money until customers realized that they lacked the expected potency.

Finally, Mr. Hart’s conclusion that “sacked” or strained wines were the origin of the wine “sack” cannot be absolutely dismissed.  It was, after all, 500 years ago.  Some people may have meant that when they said “sack” or have thought that was what it meant when they spoke the word.  There is no final arbiter to issue a decision.  Like nearly all matters at the distance of time, we can only show that one derivation is very substantially more likely than another.  That said, his footnote remains a rich and finely detailed learning experience regardless that its conclusion is wrong.


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  • How Edward de Vere Didn't Depart Italy (it turns out).  July 19, 2017.  "It seemed that Pasquale Spinola must have been mistaken or misled.  There would not have been nearly enough time to visit Florence, Siena, Rome, Naples and Palermo and to return to Venice.  Such a trip took considerable time in the 16th century."
  • Edward de Vere's Memorial For His Son, Who Died at Birth May 1583.  July 5, 2017.  "The brief Viscount Bulbeck being the son of the renowned poet and playwright Edward de Vere, we might have hoped to have the text of the father’s own memorial poem.  As far as traditional literary history is concerned, no such poem has yet been discovered."
  • Shakespeare's Apricocks.  February 21, 2017.  "While he may never have been a gardener, he does seem more than superficially knowledgeable about the gardens of his day.  One detail of such matters that he got wrong, however, is as much to the point as any."
  • John Donne's"Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day".  December 13, 2016.  "Today, December 13, is Saint Lucy’s Day.  In John Donne’s time, when the old calendar was still in use, it fell upon (and was, therefore, the feast of) the winter solstice."
  • Enter John Lyly.  October 18, 2016.  "From time to time, Shakespeare Authorship aficionados query after the name “John Lyly”.  This happens surprisingly little given the outsized role the place-seeker, novelist and playwright played in the lives of the playwright William Shakespeare and Edward de Vere."

Falstaff's Sack (p. 2)

sacke with a candle till he reeles.” The drink called sack has been copiously written about. See Dyce’s long extract from Henderson’s History of Wines, in his Glossary. But the more of these dissertations one reads, the less clear idea one has upon the subject. The word was used most vaguely of various wines, and of drinks made out of wine. To any fixed idea upon the subject advanced from one quotation from any writer of this time, another contradictory one, equally conclusive, could be advanced from another.

I do not expect to have a use for Wilkins’ play Miseries of Enforced Marriage and so will look into it no further for the present.  Samuel Rowland’s Satire would seem to refer to a reprint of four tracts collectively re-titled The Four Knaves: A Series of Satirical Tracts when issued in 1844 by the Percy Society.  Mr. Hart must have the Percy reprint as his source because none of the original four titles referred to “satire”.

Delightful references aside, then, Mr. Hart is achieving his purpose.  We are learning by these examples (and more to come) that “the more of these dissertations one reads, the less clear idea one has upon the subject. The word was used most vaguely of various wines, and of drinks made out of wine.”  The problem with identifying sack-proper is that all kinds of wines were improperly called “sack”.




In the spirit of better scholarship, Mr. Hart takes William Aldis Wright, august editor of the Clarendon Edition of the Works of Shakespeare, to task.

In a note to the Clarendon Press edition of The Tempest (p. 120) Wright says: “There were as many kinds of the wine as there are etymologies of the name.” In another note to Twelfth Night (p. 116) he pins his colours to the derivation, “sec,” dry: “not because ‘sac’ was a dry wine in the modern sense of the word, but because it was made of grapes which in a very hot summer were dried almost to raisins by the sun, and so contained a large quantity of sugar.” A most unsatisfactory derivation in every way. Sack was constantly mixed with sugar, showing it did not contain it already.

As for the raisins, Hart is entirely in the right here and for precisely the right reasons.  It is key to the identity of sack, in Shakespeare, that it is best with sugar added.  Even scholars of the highest rank have to face looking a little foolish at times.

As for Hart’s rejection of “sec”  French for “dry”  here he has the weaker argument — but is not simply wrong.  First, sack is often referred to as a Spanish wine so the “sec” would be slang for “secco”.  So then, the French derivations here are not necessarily to any point.  Still, they’re worth considering:

And “sec” (not sack) had other meanings altogether with regard to wine, i.e. “neat,” “pure.” “Boire sec . . . boire sans eau”; and “Da vin est sec . . . qu’Il n’a point de liqueur,” Dictionnaire de l’Academie. What is still more to the point is that Cotgrave has neither sack nor “sec” in reference to wine. It appears in Sherwood’s Index, “Sack, Vin d'Espagne vin sec” (1662). The earliest mention of sack I have met with is in a list of wines in Collyn Blowbol’s Testament (Haz. E. Pop. Poetry, l. 107), circa 1500: “Claret—White—Teynt—Alicaunte—Sake,” etc. 

In French, it turns out, an alcoholic beverage served without water is called “sec,” making the term the equivalent of “neat”.  But “neat,” used after this fashion, is a much later term.  In the final analysis, “sec” used in this way simply meant “without added water”.  What is most valuable, here, is the citation from 1500, before sack was generally considered to have arrived at the shores of England.

What is more to the point is the “Il n’a point de liqueur,” from the Dictionnaire de l’Academie.  (The date the entry first appeared is unclear but it can be no later than the first edition of 1687.)   That wine described as “sec,” in French, is so designated because it includes no liquor will prove to be untrue of the 


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Falstaff's Sack

Standard Citation: Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “Falstaff's SackVirtual Grub Street. 7 August 2017.

Not having a variorum edition at hand, the 1904 Arden Edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor, edited by H. C. Hart, is my go-to text for the play.  This for the exceptional footnotes.

I am one of those inexplicable souls who loves footnotes.  I even wrote an essay [see "The Internet and the Elegy"in praise of them:

Those medieval Internet sites -- those new-fangled printed books -- were
essential even should they be filled with stories of two-headed men living in a new land called America. A book on navigation which warned of the terrible beasts lurking at the edge of the world still could be quite helpful in teaching celestial navigation between mainland and monster….

…it is only at about the time of Gray's "Elegy" that footnotes and bibliographies would become commonplace. The considerable good these texts did they did without such paraphernalia. It was the thousands of other texts (or sometimes portions of the same texts), that resulted in poisonings, maimings, malnourished children, ships run aground, poor writing, bogus history, etc., which led to the adoption of standards. The vast new population of acolytes in the realm of learning were unlikely to have the time to develop a substantial background from scratch. Those who sought to do so in earnest were faced with a deluge of titles before which they were overwhelmed. Few persevered. The rest remained a step behind, the validity of their knowledge assured by bibliographies and footnotes and their willingness to use them.

They are an historically important addition from the 18th century when scholarship and educated audience was rapidly growing.



While I expect no ships run to aground in respect of a poorly annotated version of a Shakespeare play, I do expect a third-rate reading.  At least until the plays have been read for a considerable time with navigational aid of the footnote at hand.

Take, for instance, Hart’s delightful footnote on the following lines, spoken by Mr. Ford who is disguised as Mr. Brook.  He is aware of Falstaff’s love of the wine called “sack”:

Ford. … I’ll give you a pottle of
burnt sack to give me recourse to him, and tell
him my name is Brook; only for a jest.

The question Mr. Hart addresses is “Just what is sack?”.  This is not the first time the question has been addressed but his is a particularly thorough attempt at an answer.

II. i. 219. burnt sack] See again III. i. 111, and Twelfth Night, II. iii. 206.  Burning (or boiling) sack, or any other wine, was a custom in vogue to mitigate new wine, and probably also to assist in melting the sugar so constantly used in these decoctions. It is an ancient custom, and we have probably added nothing to the knowledge of the ancients with regard to the juice of the grape. “They boile new wine sufficiently to the proportion of the strength, until the hardnesse do evaporate, and that it wax mild and sweet: but being thus ordered, it will not last (they say) above one yeere,” Holland’s Plinie, xiv. 19. And later: “But to returne againe to our burning and sophistication of wines,” ibid. ch. xx. (p. 425).

Right off the bat, we get the the good and the bad of footnotes.  We now know that boiled wine cannot be aged and that someone named Holland published a translation of Pliny.  The Internet at hand, we find numerous digital reproductions of Philemon Holland’s 700-plus page Plinie (1601).  Into the library, then, and, because we have been doing this for more years than we admit to being alive, we know that, regardless of Hart's claims to the contrary, Pliny’s information bears no particular relationship to sack.

But, for better or worse, we’re off to the races.  And, in the final analysis, on balance it will be for the better:

“Dead sack” is wine so treated, and left too long. It is sometimes mentioned. Burning wine is not often referred to in Shakespeare’s time, nevertheless it was a usual practice. Thus in Wilkins’ Miseries of Enforced Marriage Act III., 1607: “Nay, nay, nay, Will: prythee come away, we have a full gallon of sack stays in the fire for thee.” And S. Rowland’s Satire, 6, 1600, “To burne

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  • Desperately Seeking Bridget (de Vere).  August 24, 2014.  "Even most people who assert that the Earl of Oxford was the poet and playwright Shake-speare (a group to which I resoundingly belong) do not seem to know that she was engaged, in 1598, to William Herbert, soon to inherit the Earldom of Pembroke,..."
  • Shake-speare and the Influence of Ronsard.  May 22, 2014.  "If Shake-speare were actually born in 1564, the question should naturally arise as to why so many of the sources for his works were written between 1560 and 1580,..."