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Tuesday, December 11, 2018

No, All is Not True, but... Kenneth Branagh.

No one does Shakespeare on film better than Kenneth Branagh.  His Hamlet is the pinnacle. All other Shakespeare movies are properly measured by how much they fall short of that 1996 masterpiece.  His exceptional Much Ado About Nothing falls less short than almost all the rest.

His current film is not a play by Shakespeare but rather a purported bio-pic of the Stratford man’s last three years in his hometown.   It is entitled All is True as was the play that was running at the Globe Theater when it burned to the ground on June 29th, 1613.  The same play was printed in the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays as Henry VIII but traditional scholars have long since agreed that far and away the lion’s share of the play was written by John Fletcher.

Branagh is presently doing a screening and public relations tour in the Hollywood / Los Angeles area in preparation for the various awards competitions for which he has entered the film.  This has also entailed doing extended interviews for each of the organizations.  Perhaps the longest was the interview for the Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists awards.  In it he greatly expands upon the lines he has memorized to present at each interview.

A number of assertions he makes in those prepared remarks are patently wrong.  But it doesn’t really matter.  The incorrect assertions are packaged together with correct assertions, albeit the correct assertions have nothing to do with writing plays. All of the assertions are heard from the mouth of Kenneth Branagh, for which reason they sound to the vast majority of his fans like a strong basis for a biography of the Stratford man as writer of the great plays.


Stratfordians, in the Authorship Debate, have faced the same feelings as Oxfordians are likely to feel listening to Branagh, when they have heard Mark Rylance and Derek Jacobi speak in favor of alternative authors.  They have reflected that even highly respected Shakespearean actors cannot be expected to know the historical details of the man who wrote the plays in which they act.  It seemed perversely unfair.

And now the shoe is very much on the other foot.  Now the public hears, from a man they utterly respect in matters Shakespearean that:

·        “Shakespeare knew nothing more about Henry VIII than we know about Shakespeare now.”  [But even traditional scholars have long agreed that he wrote only a very small portion of that play.  And there was much more historical information on that king, even then, than there is about Shakespeare now.]
·        “We know that the Globe Theater did burn down on that night.  On June 29th, 1613.”  [Of course that is indisputable but says nothing about Shakespeare.]
·        “And it was traumatizing.”  [We have no indication at all that Shakespeare was traumatized in any way.  Nor do we have any indication that he remained a shareholder in the Globe Theater after 1608.  The theater was rebuilt the year after it burned down.]
·        “And he did leave.”  [Even traditional scholars agree that he had already been away from London for years at that point except to tend to his real estate holdings.]
·        “And he did never write another play.”  [He’d written only a tiny part of All is True. There is no evidence that he ever put his hand toward any other play after the death of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.]
·        “He did pay 20 l. – or about $5000 – for a coat of arms that allowed him to be called gentleman.”  [True but it says nothing about Shakespeare as playwright.]
·        “We know that the sonnets were dedicated to the Earl of Southampton.”  [We know no such thing.  The first mention of that theory was put forward more than 200 years after Shakespeare’s death.]

Among these observations, Branagh recites a litany of genuine facts about the Stratford man’s business dealings as a grain merchant (purchase of grain tithes), the sexual peccadillos of his daughters and one of his sons-in-law, etc.  All of it, he assures us with a flourish, irrefutable truth.  All is True.  



All about the Stratford family’s details is indeed true.  The date the Globe Theater burned down is true.  The rest is — as is the case in all Shakespeare biographies — total conjecture.

“In between what we did was what Shakespeare did regularly, was to try and imagine.  And what we imagined was from the material of the plays themselves.”  The movie, that is to say, uses exactly  the same materials and approach of all of the traditional biographies.  They compose the life of the Stratford man from the materials in the plays and then declare him obviously the playwright because the resulting life and the plays echo each other.

But Branagh has done something much more.  He has given it his personal imprimatur.  He offers his reputation as proof that the movie is a legitimate biography.  After all, he has investors who are depending upon that reputation in order to clear a gratifying profit.  Movie goers will not be reading a biography that leaves the more conscious among them free to question, they will be watching a film that will coopt their reasoning processes for the end of those profits.

Truth be told, Oxfordians have been doing their best to produce films to do precisely the same thing.  And it was every bit as much an intentional conjuring trick as is this film.  Rigorous evidence is no longer much in vogue.  That being the case, the side with the best film-maker wins.

It would seem clearly to be time to consider spending more time on developing content than networking and promotion.  There will be no more “convincing” film than this.


  • Why Shakespeare Appears on Title Pages from 1598.  November 20, 2018.  ‘These he finds unconvincing.  The author’s name having appeared in a number of title pages after 1598, he continues, “it would seem foolish for publishers not to attach the Shakespeare brand to his previously unattributed plays—unless they had other reasons not to do so.”’ 
  • The Nymphs of Doctor Foreman’s Macbeth.  October 21, 2018. “How did Foreman make the mistake of describing them precisely as Holinshed?  But differently from the text we have of Macbeth?  To consider Foreman’s account a simple mistake would require an astronomically improbable coincidence.”
  • The Battle Over Shakespeare's Early and Late Plays. September 24, 2018. “The answers to the post-Oxford dilemma, of course, are three.”
  • Let the sky rain potatoes! December 16, 2017. "In fact, the sweet potato had only just begun to be a delicacy within the reach of splurging poets and playwrights and members of the middle classes at the time that The Merry Wives of Windsor (the play from which Falstaff is quoted) was written.  The old soldier liked to keep abreast of the new fads."
  • Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.





Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Connections: Henry II, Toulouse, 1159.

On about the 22nd of March, 1159, King Henry II announced throughout all of his kingdom and French provinces that he was going to raise an army in order to take possession of Toulouse, in France.   There had been relative peace in his kingdom for a brief period and he was growing restless.  It was time to expand and establish his domains in France.

Henry laid claim to the county through his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine.  Eleanor’s previous husband, Louis VII, the reigning king of France, had also claimed the region through her right of inheritance (jus uxoris).  He came to an arrangement with Raymond, Count of St. Gilles, however.  Raymond married the French king’s sister and took the region en fief as the Count of Toulouse.

In order to raise an army for the invasion, Henry imposed both a tallage tax and a tax called the scutagium or scutage.  While the tallage was common in preparation for hostilities, the scutage had rarely been levied before.  In England, church primates held the rank of barons of the realm.  Being religious, they were excepted from providing fighting men for the king.  Once the king’s new Chancellor, Thomas Becket, began running the daily operations of the kingdom, however, they began being charged the "scutage,” in lieu of each man at arms — each scutus or “shield” — required from feudal barons.  There was a furious backlash.

Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, led the opposition to the tax.  He had  reason to be particularly enraged as the Chancellor served as an Archdeacon — a high lay office — in his see and had been awarded numerous other benefits.  Thomas Becket was a commoner and had shown particular skills and connections that Theobald had wished to use.  He was so impressed, in fact, that he recommended Becket for the post of Chancellor.  This meant the church would have a highly placed ally in the councils of the king.

Once he became Chancellor, Becket never looked back.  He abandoned his duties as Archdeacon and preaching duties attached to his other positions.  He outfitted a lavish  household and lived like a secular lord.  Under his chancellorship the church was being taxed like never before to supply the ambitions of the young king who had come to love him as something of an older brother.


By the time of the invasion of Toulouse, some five years later, Becket arrived, on the 1st of July, at the muster of forces for the campaign, with seven hundred knights from his household, twelve hundred mercenaries, and four thousand servants to attend to their needs.  His retinue far outnumbered all others with the exception of the king himself.  The daily expense of such a force would have been ruinous for even a baron of the realm.

Financial ledgers had not become standardized and were not audited at that time in English history.  It cannot be determined whether Becket paid his force out of the King’s treasury or out of his own pocket.  The same is true of other lavish spending he had been doing, the couple of years before, on clothing, jewelry, gold and silver household items, etc.  However he paid for his lavish lifestyle, the King must have been aware of the expenditure and does not seem to have immediately objected.  In time, however, he would hint that the Chancellor’s handling of the kingdom’s finances hadn’t been proper.

Henry’s expedition was thwarted when he unexpectedly found he was laying siege to Toulouse with King Louis VII himself inside.  Becket, being modern in his judgments, advised taking the city and ransoming the French king.  Henry, being a feudal king, owed his French possessions to Louis and the homage that went with them.  He raised his siege and harassed the countryside and nearby towns.

Having taken the city of Cahors, Henry left Becket in charge and proceeded to ravage the countryside more to the south.  Becket could not resist the temptation to put his force to use and attacked the French with such success that he became renowned.  He commanded each engagement personally, in full armor and arms, leading charges and unhorsing professional knights.

While Henry had been laying siege to Toulouse, Nicholas Breakspear, Pope Adrian IV, was demanding the respect of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarosa, in a conflict that was threatening to bring Europe to war.  Diplomatic pouches were full with tense correspondence back and forth.  Adrian has been the only English Pope in history thus far.  He had shown great favor to his home country, in particular, by granting Ireland to Henry, in 1155.

On August 30, Adrian died.  Eight days later Roland Bandinelli was elected Pope Alexander III.  Ottaviano dei Crescenzi, the second highest vote-getter, was installed by Barbarosa, in Rome, as the anti-Pope Victor IV.  Alexander III would eventually be installed at Sens, in France, beyond the Emperor’s reach.  With the election, Alexander III, Henry and Thomas Becket were launched on a collision course.  They had no inkling what was to come.

  • Medieval Scavagers: First, what they were not. November 18, 2018. ‘The fact that the professor quoted Riley — regardless that neither he nor Riley were able to give a single citation to support their claim — began a now venerated commonplace that Medieval “Scavagers” began by collecting the English tax called the “Scavage”.’
  • The Nymphs of Doctor Foreman’s Macbeth.  October 21, 2018. “How did Foreman make the mistake of describing them precisely as Holinshed?  But differently from the text we have of Macbeth?  To consider Foreman’s account a simple mistake would require an astronomically improbable coincidence.”
  • Let the sky rain potatoes! December 16, 2017. "In fact, the sweet potato had only just begun to be a delicacy within the reach of splurging poets and playwrights and members of the middle classes at the time that The Merry Wives of Windsor (the play from which Falstaff is quoted) was written.  The old soldier liked to keep abreast of the new fads."
  • Sir Anthony Bacon: a Life in the Shadows. January 25, 2016.  "Somehow Sir Anthony had the habit of ingratiating himself in circles of the highest historical interest and most questionable mores."
  • Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Questi

 

Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Why Shakespeare Appears on Title Pages from 1598.

Francis Bacon
Recently a short essay by Richard Agemo[1] asks why Shakespeare’s plays suddenly began displaying the author’s name on their title pages in the year 1598.  “Traditional explanations,” he informs his readers, “include:”

·        Elizabethan plays weren’t thought of as literature until after 1600.
·        The title page of most plays during the 1590s didn’t name an author.
·        Some playwrights were never named on a title page while they were alive.
·        In the case of John Lyly, some of his plays were published over a dozen years until his name appeared on a title page in 1597.

These he finds unconvincing.  The author’s name having appeared in a number of title pages after 1598, he continues, “it would seem foolish for publishers not to attach the Shakespeare brand to his previously unattributed plays—unless they had other reasons not to do so.”

Among the other  things that occurred in 1598, it is worth noting, that in September, Francis Mere’s Palladis Tamia was entered in the Stationers registers for publication.  It was published in the same year.  Meres gave the first description of the plays of William Shakespeare.  I quote from my Edward de Vere was Shakespeare: at long last the proof:

250.  But, as with so much in Edward De Vere’s life, Meres’ praise had a worrisome side.  He mentions Shake-speare’s plays by name:
As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines: so Shakespeare, among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage; for Comedy, witnes his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love labours lost, his Love labours wonne, his Midsummers night dreame, & his Merchant of Venice: for Tragedy, his Richard the 2. Richard the 3. Henry the 4. King Iohn, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet.
Shake-speare the poet was now Shake-speare writer for the common stage.  Those who knew he was The Bard, but only knew him as the poet, now knew that he was the person who had written the plays, many of which indeed border on libel in certain scenes.[2]

Earlier, in the introduction, I had pointed out the following regarding the same topic:

xx.  That same year, quartos of popular plays began to appear with Shake-speare listed on the title page as author.[3]

The titles of those quartos show an unmistakable pattern.

Almost exactly a year before, Edward de Vere’s daughter, Elizabeth, the Countess of Derby, had furiously been cast out of the house by her husband.  He had received letters informing him that she had had an affair with the Earl of Essex.  Matters looked very bad for her.  The Earl of Derby only relented so far as to allow her to escape from his fury because certain of the servants dedicated to her had managed to convince him that the rumors might have been wrong however trusted the source.




In the book I advance the theory that the mysterious missing Shakespeare play Love’s Labours Won was rewritten by Edward in order to support the effort to save his daughter’s reputation and marriage.  The play would be presented at Court in February of 1598 (New Style).[4]  Thenceforward it would be known as Much Adoe About Nothing.  The change would have occurred too soon before Meres’ book went to press for him to become aware of it.

If we look at the list of Shakespeare plays mentioned by Mere’s we find the following:

Gentlemen of Verona
Errors
Love Labors Lost
Love Labors Wonne
Midsummers Night Dream
Merchant of Venice
Richard the 2
Richard the 3
Henry the 4,
King John
Titus Andronicus
Romeo and Juliet

If we list the plays published in quarto, with Shakespeare's name on the title page, between 1598 and the pirated version of Hamlet, in 1603, we find all but one had been titles named by Meres:

Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598)
Richard III (1598)
Richard II (1598)
Henry IV, Part 1 (1599)
Henry IV, Part 2 (1600)
The Merchant of Venice (1600)
Much Ado About Nothing (1600) (the new name of Love’s Labours Won)
Merry Wives of Windsor (1602)

As for the Richard plays, they were merely recently published anonymous plays for which the galleys had remained intact.  A tiny change to the title page and they were re-released as new editions of the plays by the now famous playwright William Shakespeare featured in Francis Meres’ popular Palladis Tamia.  As for the Merry Wives, it could only have been a matter of time before publishers began teasing the names of the authors of various works out of those who were in the know.

Shakespeare’s name and some others must have improved sales.  There had to have been printer’s agents looking for the names of authors to put on previously anonymous plays.  Predictably, they would have been a pretty hit-or-miss crew and their employers not too particular about whether the name on the title page was correct.  Shakespeare’s name next appeared on the title pages of the The London Prodigal (1605), King Lear (1608), The Yorkshire Tragedy (1608), and Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1609).

There is no sign that Shakespeare himself joined in the new trend by providing the names of the plays he had written to date.  Nor by declaring himself the author of Troilus and Cressida (1609).  Of course, Edward de Vere was dead at the time.  The Epistle-Preface even says as much (as I have explained in my Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584)[5]).  It also gives us a strong hint that Susan de Vere and the Herbert brothers may have been the “grand possessors” of the only manuscript of the play at the time:

thanke fortune for the scape it hath made amongst you. Since by the grand possessors wills I beleeue you should haue prayd for them rather then beene prayd.[6]





[1] Agemo, Richard.  “From No Name to Shakespeare . . . or Not.”  http://richardagemo.com/from-no-name-to-shakespeare-or-not/.  Last accessed 11/20/2018.
[2] Edward de Vere was Shakespeare: at long last the proof, 250.
[3] Ibid., xx.
[4] Ibid., 245.  “According to the 19th century scholar, Frederick Fleay, the records of the Court Revels show Shake-speare’s Love’s Labours Lost was played at Whitehall over the Christmas holidays.   He feels it is likely that Shake-speare’s Love’s Labour Won, rewritten to be the play we now know as Much Adoe About Nothing, played for the first time in the next February (1598, new style).  Considering the many minor errors in the revels records, it is by no means impossible that Much Adoe played, rewritten but still under its earlier name, during the holidays.”
[5] The Early Plays of Shakespeare: Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584), 6114.  ‘The prologue speaks of “the grand possessors wills” who Steevens interprets as “Heming and Condell”. It seems that the Herbert brothers (Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery) and, Edward de Vere’s daughter, the Countess of Montgomery might better fit the description.’ 
[6] Shakespeare's Troilus And Cressida: The First Quarto, 1609. A Facsimile in Photo – Lithography by William Griggs, 2.

  • The Nymphs of Doctor Foreman’s Macbeth.  October 21, 2018. “How did Foreman make the mistake of describing them precisely as Holinshed?  But differently from the text we have of Macbeth?  To consider Foreman’s account a simple mistake would require an astronomically improbable coincidence.”
  • The Battle Over Shakespeare's Early and Late Plays. September 24, 2018. “The answers to the post-Oxford dilemma, of course, are three.”
  • Edward de Vere Changes the Course of History: Christmas, 1580. September 17, 2018. “First Secretary to the Queen, Sir Francis Walsingham, had been pressing the Queen since at least the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, in France, in 1573, to recognize that Catholicism was, by its nature, unalterably inimical to her person and her throne.”
  • Let the sky rain potatoes! December 16, 2017. "In fact, the sweet potato had only just begun to be a delicacy within the reach of splurging poets and playwrights and members of the middle classes at the time that The Merry Wives of Windsor (the play from which Falstaff is quoted) was written.  The old soldier liked to keep abreast of the new fads."
  • Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.




Sunday, November 18, 2018

Medieval Scavagers: First, what they were not.


In his 1899 book The Commune of London, and other studies, a Mr. J. H. Round challenged Henry Thomas Riley the editor of the highly respected Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis Liber albus, Liber custumarum,[1] etc. ...:

In his introduction to the 'Liber Albus' (1859) Mr. Riley held that —
The City Scavagers, it appears, were originally public officers, whose duty it was to attend at the Hythes and Quays for the purpose of taking custom upon the Scavage (i.e. Showage) or opening out of imported goods.[2]
*
Professor Skeat adopts this view in his etymological Dictionary, and develops it at some length,… But no evidence whatever is adduced by Mr. Riley for his assertion that the "Scavagers " originally performed the above duty or had anything to do with it.[3]
Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary was the most respected in its kind, at the time, the Oxford English Dictionary only being in its infancy.  The fact that the professor quoted Riley — regardless that neither he nor Riley were able to give a single citation to support their claim — began a now venerated commonplace that Medieval “Scavagers” began by collecting the English tax called the “Scavage”.

The next edition (1902) of Skeat’s Dictionary dropped the claim, in respect of Mr. Round’s challenge,  but did not replace it with any clarification or retraction.  While Mr. Round was correct — the Liber Albus did not, in fact, provide any citation to support Riley’s claim — the exact match between the terms surely suggested to Skeat that Riley’s conjecture could well have been correct.

As it turns out, over 100 years later, still no one seems to have found any reference to the scavagers as tax collectors.  The Liber Albus does provide oaths of various city of London officials, including the office of “Scavager”, but it does so in Norman French, so I will quote them as translated in Arnold’s English language Chronicle of 1502.[4]




The oath of the London “Scavagers” is as follows:

Ye shall swere that ye shal wel and dilige[n]tly ouersee that the paueme[n]t  in eueri warde be wele and rightfulli repayred and not [en]hau[n]sed to ye [an]noyaunce of the neybourghs and that ye weis stretis and lanes be kepid clene fro dong and other filthe for honeste of the cyte, and that alle the chemenis redossis[5] and furnessis[6] be made of stone for desente of fyr, and if ye knowe ani such ye shal shewe it to the Aldirman y he may make dew redresse therfore, and this ye shal not leue so helpe you God, &c[7]
Few  other cities had them and those that did put them to the same uses.  In the Norman French original they are called “scawageours,” from the Old French escawer (“to inspect”).  They were city inspectors.

The scavage tax, on the other hand, was called “Seawenge” in the original Norman French.  The word was probably borrowed from the original Anglo-Saxon population.  It was a “shewenge” tax.  A fee charged before the city would allow a foreign trader to show or display his wares in the city market.

As for who collected the scavage tax, another oath helps clarify:

Also al maner mercymentys and fynes that ye shall ressayue ye shall well and truly brings theym to ye cou[n]ter, and there to delyuer theim to the Sherefs or to hys depute.[8]
This is from the oath of the “Sherefs Sergaunts”.  It was they who were charged with collecting fines and customs.  This makes sense as half the original scavage was granted to the Sheriffs (there were two to four at any given time) by the original charter establishing London scavage rights.  What later law suits are available to me uniformly refer to members of the sheriff’s office collecting the tax.

Note: In a disconcerting apparent coincidence, the scavager of Dublin, Ireland, was granted certain market tolls in lieu of a salary in about the year 1634.[9] [10]  The oath of the Dublin “Scavenger” makes no mention whatsoever of collecting either “scavage” or tolls of any sort.[11]  Her constituents complained bitterly that she neglected her duties entirely while vigorously collecting the tolls and more that weren’t due to her.[12]

Her successor, a Mr. William Harvey[13] proved a marked improvement in both diligently applying himself to the cleanliness and repair of the city and collecting only the prescribed tolls.  The toll arrangement being without legal establishment, a Mr. Henry Steele, maltser of Oxmanton, had Harvey arrested (apparently by the Royal authorities) in 1661.  Legal proceedings were initiated.  The city provided its scavager a lawyer.  Collection of the tolls by the city scavager was temporarily interdicted by court injunction until the matter could be considered.

Some two years later, the Irish Parliament ordered that the Dublin tolls be thenceforth collected only by direct, lawful representatives of the Mayor and Sheriffs’ offices.  This would bring all very much in line with the medieval precedent regarding the scavage  tax which had already been ended in England itself for some 200 years.  At no point, however, did the Dublin authorities refer to the tolls in their records as a “scavage” tax.  That the ancient scavage was known to them, and the inspiration for the means of payment they had arranged, cannot be perfectly disproven.



[1] Riley, Henry Thomas. Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis Liber albus, Liber custumarum… (1859).  The Liber Albus is a compilation of London customs collected in 1419.
[2] Ibid., xli.
[3] Round, J. H.  The commune of London, and other studies (1899).  256-7.
[4] The Customs of London Otherwise Called Arnold's Chronicle (Second Edition, 1811).  96.  The first edition of the Chronicle by “one Arnold, a citizen of London” was published around 1502.
[5] grounds, yards
[6] hearths, ovens
[7] Arnold’s, 96.
[8] Ibid., 94.  The Norman French original of this oath does not appear in Riley’s Liber Albus.
[9] Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin..., Volume 3 (1892).  xxii.
[10] Ibid., 221.  Water Bailiffs and Marshalls were also paid by grants to collect city tolls at this time.
[11] Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin..., Volume 1 (1889). 262.
[12] Ibid., xxiii.
[13] Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin..., Volume 3 (1892). 118, 318.  Her immediate successor was Walter Sedgrave whose neglect also was bitterly complained of.  He was followed by Thomas Jones who was granted a small yearly cash fee from the owners of every shop, house and market stall.  

  • Shakespeare on Gravity. August 26, 2018. “So carelessly does Shakespeare throw out such an extraordinary divination. His achievement in thus, as it were, rivalling Newton may seem in a certain sense even more extraordinary than Goethe's botanical and osteological discoveries;…”
  • Let the sky rain potatoes! December 16, 2017. "In fact, the sweet potato had only just begun to be a delicacy within the reach of splurging poets and playwrights and members of the middle classes at the time that The Merry Wives of Windsor (the play from which Falstaff is quoted) was written.  The old soldier liked to keep abreast of the new fads."
  • Sir Anthony Bacon: a Life in the Shadows. January 25, 2016.  "Somehow Sir Anthony had the habit of ingratiating himself in circles of the highest historical interest and most questionable mores."
  • Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.




Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Kindle Update to Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584)

I am pleased to announce that Kindle has agreed to send all who have purchased my Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584) an upgraded text.  You will find the download on the "Manage Your Content and Devices" page of the Reader or app on which you have the book stored.

Books purchased prior to October 27 will be substantially upgraded.  Books purchased after the 27th will find many fewer changes.

MS Word to Kindle formatting problems have been cleared up such that footnote cross-references now have proper citation numbers.  Collapsed line breaks have been restored.  Google digital book to MS Word formatting problems have all (or almost all) been corrected.

Because MSWord gives up on spell or grammar checking when portions of a text are in irregular spelling and the text is long, there are also a number of typos corrected.  This was a huge project, though, and I've already found one more typo since the corrected text was accepted.  Still, there will be many fewer.

For those who have yet to purchase a copy, I'm pleased that yours will have a cleaner text from the get-go.  Enjoy the read!





Sunday, November 11, 2018

"Shakespeare's Latin Sources for 1000, Alex": Maximianus.


Standard Citation: Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. '"Shakespeare's Latin Sources for 100 Alex": Maximianus.'  Virtual Grub Street,  https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2018/11/shakespeares-latin-sources-for-100-alex.html [state date accessed].

While reading Robinson Ellis’s article “On the Elegies of Maximianus”[1], for background toward a review of A. M. Juster’s recent translation of the Elegies[2], I came across the following:

The 19th Sonnet of Shakespere begins with these verses :

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood.
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws.

which are, to say the least, very like Maxim. I 271, 2,

Fracta diu rabidi conpescitur ira leonis
Lentaque per senium Caspia tigris erit.

[Long broken down, the angry lion’s rage is checked;
A Caspian tiger will be slow in dotage.[3]]

It is the kind of Shakespeare reference scattered everywhere in our literature.  To wander at large through literary scholarly texts day after day is to come upon such dim, lonely stars, from time to time, far from the central constellations of Shakespeare scholarship.

Often they are suggestions that The Bard might have known one or another Latin text.  In the above instance, the similarity is clear enough but but not necessarily close enough.  Maximilianus was quite popular during the Middle Ages, and, during the 16th century, Schweiger’s Handbuch der classischen Bibliographie lists editions published in 1501 (Venice), 1503 (Paris), 1509 (Strasburg), 1518 (Lyon)[4], and 1588 (Florence).  Our poet could easily have read the elegies.  But it lacks blunted claws or toothless jaws.  For me, it is too general to be advanced as a certainty.

Of course, most investigations of Shakespeare’s debt to Latin works are not obiter dicta.  Nor are all commentators sure they enjoy the task.

‘Any learned scholar who took a delight in what I confess seems to me the barren and ungrateful task of pointing out all the passages in Shakespeare capable of serving as a text, or pretext, for classical quotations,’ Paul Stapfer complains, ‘would have to distinguish three separate classes: first, the passages borrowed directly from ancient authors; second, those borrowed indirectly; third, mere coincidences.


The distinction is not always easy to make; as, for instance, when Ophelia is buried, Laertes takes last leave of her in the touching and poetic words:—

"Lay her i' the earth ;
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring! " (Act V., Sc. 1.)

And in Persius we find—

"Non nunc e manibus istis,
Non nunc e tumulo fortunataque favilla
Nascentur violae?"

[Is not now his departing spirit,
Not now the grave that holds his fair ashes
Sprung up with violets?]

Did Shakespeare borrow this, or is it a mere coincidence?’[5]

Here, I suggest, the exact match of small details tells us that the two passages are indeed related.  Both sets of remains are of fair (fortunataque) persons.  Both graves specifically sprout violets.  Shakespeare seems clearly to have read from the Satires of Persius.

What seems not to be related is the tone and context.  Persius cannot give himself momentary permission to compose a genuinely beautiful lyrical swatch without it being also a sneer. There is no sign that such is the case in Hamlet’s elegiac moment on the death of Ophelia.

Among the many points half made in Stapfer’s book is the fact that ‘…it was not on account of an insufficient knowledge of Latin that he preferred to use the English translation of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" rather than the original, but because he read English more quickly, and less time was lost.’[6]  There are plenty of signs that he was widely read in the Latin classics.  But as he moved away from plays for Court audiences, toward plays for London audiences, there were fewer references drawn directly from Latin sources. 

What sources Shakespeare went to in each play are amongst the best evidence of when and in what order the plays were written.  As a general rule, plays written to be acted before the Royal Court tended to display their authors’ classical learning.  Plays with Latin quotes are almost certain to have been written for either the Court or the Universities.  If the quotes throughout were short, the stuff of school lessons, and/or generally epigrammatic, the play was written to be performed by a boys’ company probably in Blackfriars.  If the quotes were longer and integrated more into the play it was written to be performed at a university or an Inn of Court.  Shakespeare displays these same stylistic markers.

When Shakespeare switched from writing plays for the Court to plays for a general audience, Latin rarely appeared in the text.  Displays of education were neither detected nor appreciated by such audiences.  He also goes to translations more because he is writing more, with more complex delineation of character, and, thus, at a more demanding pace.  In the words of Stapfer “he read English more quickly, and less time was lost.”  Also, as a result, he began plagiarizing whole speeches from works the style of which he greatly admired.  Whether as an effect or a parallel development, his plays were becoming more complex literary works needing new strategies in order to get them ready for performance in the limited time at hand.



[1] Ellis, Robinson.  “On the Elegies of Maximianus I”. The American Journal of Philology,   Vol. V, No. 17, 1.  New York: MacMillan and Co., 1884.
[3] Juster, 37.
[4] Published together with selections from Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius as was often the case.
[5] Stapfer, Paul.  Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity, 95.
[6] Stapfer, 102.


  • Edward de Vere’s Ulysses and Agamemnon. Highlighting the Real Issue.  October 30, 2018. “When I did return to investigate more deeply, the results were astonishing.  All tests indicated that the earlier play was incorporated in its entirety.”
  • The Battle Over Shakespeare's Early and Late Plays. September 24, 2018. "Vere had been writing The Tempest for his daughter’s upcoming wedding.  Upon his death, his friend William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, who was known to have collected every printed and manuscript word he could get his hands on about the ongoing explorations in the South Atlantic, likely put on the final touches."
  • Shakespeare on Gravity. August 26, 2018. “So carelessly does Shakespeare throw out such an extraordinary divination. His achievement in thus, as it were, rivalling Newton may seem in a certain sense even more extraordinary than Goethe's botanical and osteological discoveries;…”
  • Let the sky rain potatoes! December 16, 2017. "In fact, the sweet potato had only just begun to be a delicacy within the reach of splurging poets and playwrights and members of the middle classes at the time that The Merry Wives of Windsor (the play from which Falstaff is quoted) was written.  The old soldier liked to keep abreast of the new fads."
  • Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.