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Sunday, September 30, 2018

Account of a Performance of Macbeth: April 20, 1611.


Alexandre-Marie Colin. The Three Witches from "Macbeth," 1827.
In earlier years, I used to read “Tam O’Shanter” every Hallow E’en. This because life has so few traditions anymore.  At least that are not at all related to a seasonal television show or a holiday menu.  I don’t recall just when I left off but it was a good while ago.  I wonder if, this year, I am casting a wider net?   

The following is a literary treasure.  It is an extended diary account, by Doctor and Astrologer Simon Foreman, of a performance, on April 20, 1611, of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It can be difficult to find and I will hopefully be referring to it, in further posts, as the holiday approaches, to explore a few questions. 

Foreman himself was a fascinating character. Perhaps there will even be some time to explore the rest of the diary someday.

One detail of this account, in particular, promises to go a long way toward understanding the date of composition and a key detail as to the state of the text in 1611.  Can you see it?  It is very well hidden in very plain sight, I think it’s fair to say.


'In Mackbeth at the glob, 16jo, the 20 of Aprill, ther was to be obserued, firste, howe Mackbeth and Bancko, 2 noble men of Scotland, Ridinge thorowe a wod, the[r] stode before them 3 women feiries or Nimphes, And saluted Mackbeth, sayinge, 3 tyms vnto him, haille mackbeth, King of Codon; for thou shall be a kinge, but shalt beget No kinge, &c. then said Bancko, what all to mackbeth And nothing to me. Yes, said the nimphes, haille to thee Banko, thou shalt beget kings, yet be no kinge. And so they departed & cam to the courte of Scotland to Dunkin king of Scotes, and yt was in



the dais of Edward the Confessor. And Dunkin bad them both kindly wellcome, And made Mackbeth forth with Prince of Northumberland, and sent him hom to his own castell, and appointed mackbeth to prouid for him, for he wold Sup with him the next dai at night, & did soe. And mackebeth contriued to kull Dunkin, & thorowe the persuasion of his wife did that night Murder the kinge in his own castell, beinge his gueste. And ther were many prodigies seen that night & the dai before. And when Mack Beth had murdred the kinge, the blod on his handes could not be washed of by any means, nor from his wiues handes which handled the bloddi daggers in hiding them, By which means they became both much amazed &  ffronted, the murder being knowen. Dunkins 2 sonns fled, the on to England, the [other to] Walles, to saue them selues. They beinge fled, they were supposed guilty of the murder of their father, which was nothinge so. Then was Mackbeth crowned kinge, and then he for feare of Banko, his old companion, that he should beget kinges but be no kinge him selfe, he contriued the death of Banko, and caused him to be Murdred on the way as he Rode. The next night, being at supper w1th his noble men whom he had bid to a feaste to the which also Banco should haue com, he began to speak of Noble Banco, and to wish that he were ther. And as he thus did, standing vp to drincke a Carouse to him, the ghoste of Banco came and sate down in his cheier be-hind him. And he turning About to sit down Again sawe the goste of banco, which fronted him so, that he fell in-to a great passion of fear and fury, Vtteringe many word« about his murder, by which, when they hard that Banco was Murdred they Suspected Mackbet.

'Then Mack Dove fled to England to the kinges sonn, And soe they Raised an Army, And cam into scotland, and at dunston Anyse ouerthrue Mackbet. In the mean tyme whille macdouee was in England, Mackbet slewe Mackdoues wife & children, and after in the battelle mackdoue slewe mackbet. '

‘Obserue Also howe mackbetes quen did Rise in the night, in the night in her slepe, & walke and talked and confessed all & the doctor noted her wordes.'[1]



[1] A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, MacBeth (1903). H. H. Furness, ed. 356-7.

  • 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.



Monday, September 24, 2018

The Battle Over Shakespeare's Early and Late Plays.

The earlier and later plays of Shakespeare are uniformly problematical.  Well before the Authorship Question, the finest and most dedicated scholars struggled with facts inconsistent with then prevailing theories.  Since the Question, Oxfordians have struggled, regarding some plays, traditionally assigned late dates, that contain apparent references to events that occurred after Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford’s, death (in June of 1604). Stratfordians have struggled with plays the details of which suggest dates before 1587 (when the Stratford man is thought to have arrived in London).  Earlier dates are also worrisome to them because their candidate must somehow have found the time to acquire vast amounts of education on the fly and to be an apprentice actor and playwright before writing the greatest plays of English literature.

This, then, explains why Stratfordian-aligned scholars have suddenly begun discovering that more and more Shakespeare plays must have been written after June of 1604.  The references in all of the plays in question have been known and acknowledged for a century or more.  Previous scholars have determined that there was insufficient evidence to assign the plays to Shakespeare and/or a date.  The growing popularity of Oxfordianism, however, has clearly lowered the bar.  Troubled times, it seems, have called for troubling abandonment of standards.

The answers to the post-Oxford dilemma, of course, are three.  1) Many of the references for which sources allegedly did not exist until after Oxford’s death were actually available.  The effort to bring those sources to light has gone passably well. 2) Shakespeare never wrote the play Double Falsehood now being assigned to him in an effort to disqualify Oxford by any means necessary (a matter for later publication).  3) Edward de Vere was working on at least three plays at the time of his death.  The Tempest and Macbeth were in-progress.  Henry VIII was either an earlier unfinished play or also in-progress. That is why their line counts are so short.  That is why they are finished by others.  All of the other plays from the First Folio were complete at that time.



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.  The fingerprints of Thomas Middleton are all over about a third of Macbeth which Vere had been writing in hopes that the new Scottish King James I would be pleased.  It was Middleton who wrote the lines concerning the Gunpowder Plot.  A brief early account of a performance of Macbeth makes clear that the witches (one of Middleton’s specialties) had been written quite differently at the time.  This indicates that an earlier hand had been put toward finishing the play with unsatisfactory results before Middleton was called in.  That hand arguably still peeks through here and there.

Very little of the Henry VIII play had been written at the time of Vere’s death.  Little more than an outline and early partial-versions of several scenes.  These John Fletcher, the then most popular up-and-coming playwright of the time, tried to turn into a full Shakespeare play.  But he only knew how to be John Fletcher and his is the dominant hand.  The play was presumably called Shakespeare’s in hopes of drawing larger audiences.  The gods apparently being offended, the Globe Theater burned to the ground in the middle of its first performance.

As for plays published before 1588-or-so, authors were not yet listed on title pages.  If they were an earlier version of a Shakespeare play, published in quarto, they are explained away, by Stratfordians, as having been earlier plays, by lesser writers, that he rewrote.  The fact that he re-used the text and action of many of them in a wholesale fashion — engaged, that is to say, in wholesale plagiarism — is said to have been common at the time (although other such examples from other playwrights curiously do not seem to have survived).  If such an explanation seems insupportable, the earlier, much less mature play, is declared to have been imperfectly copied by hand by an audience member trying to steal it.  One way or another, the apprentice hand is explained.

In some few cases— such as the early King Leir — Vere/Shakespeare really did not write the play (which further confuses the early plays question).  But more on that another time.

This said, Oxfordians struggle to make a compelling case about the much earlier dates of the plays.  It’s a tough slog.  There are no shortcuts.  Amateur scholars have neither the patience, as the rule, nor the paycheck of the greats of the 19th century.  While we are more resourced toward success, with the help of computers and the Internet, we are less likely to achieve success with the massive attention-drain of television, computers and the Internet.

Anyway, I will soon publish just such a compelling case.  It’s not summer beach reading.  That’s for sure.


  • 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.”
  • Why Did Queen Elizabeth Fear Richard II So? September 10, 2018.  Interestingly, the infamous “deposition scene” in the play, in which Richard concedes his unfitness for the crown, did not appear in the 1597 first quarto.  It did not appear until after Queen Elizabeth’s  death when the third quarto was published in 1608.
  • Shakespeare On Blood-Flow. August 19, 2018, “For all of the obvious examples, such as Hamlet’s mention of the supernova that held the attention of all the world, in 1572, and the description of St. Elmo’s Fire in The Tempest, however, the answer lies much more quietly woven into the text of the poems and plays as a whole.”
  • 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.'
  • Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

Monday, September 17, 2018

Edward de Vere Changes the Course of History: Christmas, 1580.


The Christmas festivities of 1580 were a fateful moment for the Vere-Howard Court faction and for Catholics in the realm of England.  The history of it and all that followed tends to be viewed by historians through a wide variety of lenses representing political interests to this day.  What can be said with certainty is that the events of those festivities marked the end of religious tolerance in England under Queen Elizabeth.

I quote from my Edward de Vere was Shakespeare by way of setting the scene:

126.  However much his move to London and turn toward literary matters may have comforted him, De Vere was still as much courtier as writer.  On the 16th of December, he reacted with violent words to a perceived affront at Court from Phillip Howard, the Earl of Arundel, and threatened to be revenged on all the Howard clan.  His fury may have calmed by Christmas night but fate would keep the feud alive.  During the Court celebrations, De Vere informed Charles Arundel, a close member of the Vere-Howard faction, that a warrant had been issued for Charles Arundel’s and Henry Howard’s arrests.  Henry Howard seems already to have assumed that this might be a result of De Vere’s threatened revenge and had begun encouraging his fellow crypto-Catholics to turn the spotlight on their adversary, and away from themselves, by colluding to bear witness to every “monstrous” activity they could declare or contrive.[1]
What wasn’t contrived was Vere’s accusation that Howard and Arundel were secretly practicing Catholics.  Seven years before, their faction’s leader, the Duke of Norfolk, had been executed for planning to marry the Catholic Mary Stuart and to usurp the throne.  Now the two were supplying information to the French ambassador, Mauvissiere, representative of her Catholic frenemy, Mary's brother-in-law, the French King.

Among the accusations that were contrived, was that Edward, too, was a Catholic.  He admitted to having tried the Catholic mass once or twice but only to find out what it was about.  He assured the Queen that he remained an Anglican.  He was turning state’s evidence on his friends.  It was they who tempted him and they were dedicated Catholics.

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 1572, to recognize that Catholicism was, by its nature, unalterably inimical to her person and her throne.  She had remained remarkably tolerant in spite of his dire warnings.  Catholics continued to go about their lives so long as they recognized that, in England, they owed their allegiance to their  monarch who was the unchallenged head of the true church.

Vere escaped punishment for his brief flirtation with the Catholic host.  In the process, however, he was revealed to have deflowered one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, Anne Vavasour.  Vavasour was soon delivered of a child.  Vere was briefly imprisoned following which he was exiled from Court for 2+ years.

The Christmas affair and investigations to follow finally convinced the Queen that Walsingham was wise to advise her to actively pursue Catholics as traitors by virtue of their religion alone. While she continued to be blind to the religion of some members of the nobility and of her chapel musicians, so long as they remained absolutely silent about their faith, the rest of her subjects stood to lose everything including their lives.

Earlier in 1580, Walsingham’s fierce rooting out of all “treason” had resulted in the arrest of William Carter, a Catholic printer, for publishing “A Treatise of Schism”.  The book contained a call to all “catholike gentlewomen” to follow the Biblical example of Judith that

…they might destroye Holofernes, the master hereticke, and amase all his retinew, and never defile their religion by communicating with them in anye smale point.
In this passage, Walsingham detected a tropological directive for the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting of Catholic leanings to look for an opportunity to murder her. 


Already, in 1579, Pope Gregory XIII had sent an invasion force to support insurrection in Ireland in hopes of a base from which to harry, if not invade, England and remove the “heretic Queen”.  Walsingham and Burghley’s European informants were reporting continuous planning to assemble an invasion force in Spain with sufficient power to destroy the English navy and march on the Cinque Ports and London.  At that time, the Spanish navy was considered far-and-away the most powerful in the world.

Under these conditions Elizabeth’s desire for toleration was swept away.  Walsingham’s every word became scripture.  Every publication and play was closely checked for hidden calls to depose the Queen.  The author and publisher of a work in which such a call was detected was in grave danger of suffering a horrifying fate.

Carter was found guilty and executed, in 1583, by hanging and drawing and quartering.  The delay occurred because Walsingham sought to gain names of Catholic plotters and details of their networks and plans from him under protracted torture before trying him.  For two years Thomas Norton, the co-author of the seminal play Gorboduc, but later famed throughout England and Europe as “the rack-master,” oversaw his continual torture.




[1] Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Edward de Vere was Shakespeare: at long last theproof.  Richmond, VA: The Virtual Vanaprastha, 2013. 126.


  • Why Did Queen Elizabeth Fear Richard II So? September 10, 2018.  Interestingly, the infamous “deposition scene” in the play, in which Richard concedes his unfitness for the crown, did not appear in the 1597 first quarto.  It did not appear until after Queen Elizabeth’s  death when the third quarto was published in 1608.
  • 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;…”
  • Shakespeare’s King Richard II as Prequel. August 06, 2018. “It is for the same reason, more or less, that we must accept that Richard II was written before Henry V.  When the players replied to the Essex conspirators “that of King Richard as being so old and so long out of use” would not attract an audience, they were indeed referring to Shakespeare’s Richard II.  And they knew what they were talking about.”
  • Amurath III and The True Tragedy of Richard III. June 11, 2018. “So then, when Professor Mott honed this information, in his 1921 paper, the shock it created was not because verities were shattered.”
  • Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

Monday, September 10, 2018

Why Did Queen Elizabeth Fear Richard II So?

I have previously gone over evidence supporting an early date for Shakespeare’s Richard II in my “Shakespeare’s King Richard II as Prequel” [link]. There are other mysteries surrounding the play that are every bit as suggestive of a date of 1587 or ‘88.

Interestingly, the infamous “deposition scene” in the play, in which Richard concedes his unfitness for the crown, did not appear in the 1597 first quarto.  It did not appear until after Queen Elizabeth’s  death when the third quarto was published in 1608.  When the play was performed before the Essex plotters, however, the deposition scene was by no means new.  As many have noticed:

The " new additions " in the third quarto, which appear also in the succeeding editions, occur in act iv., scene 1, lines 154-318 inclusive. Though not printed during the life of Elizabeth, there can be little doubt that they formed part of the play as originally written; for they agree with the act in style and rhythm, and are the natural introduction to the Abbot's speech (line 321) : "A woeful pageant have we here beheld." Their suppression in the earlier editions was probably for fear of offending Elizabeth, who was very sensitive upon the subject of the deposition of an English sovereign.[1]

After Richard II was played before the  plotters Elizabeth is recounted to have told William Lambarde, the keeper of the records in the Tower, " I am Richard the Second; know ye not that?"

By all appearances, the Queen had somehow suffered a very unpleasant experience around the comparison of Richard to herself.  The arguments against his fitness for the crown would not necessarily have been the reason for her ferocious defensiveness.  That he could be deposed at all may have established an unbearable precedent.  Throughout her reign the fact that she was a woman had suggested to a wide range of Englishmen that she was unfit to rule and must be removed.




Two years before the Essex Rebellion

In 1599, Sir John Haywarde was severely censured in the Star Chamber, and committed to prison, for his "History of the First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry IV.," which contained an account of the deposition of Richard.[2]

It was dedicated to the Earl of Essex.  In it he described Richard’s faults, the foremost of which is the foremost accusation of the nobles in Shakespeare’s play.

to priuate men it was sufficient if themselues abstaine from wrong, but a prince must prouide that none do wrong vnder him: for by mainteining, or wincking at the vices of his officers, he maketh them his owne, and shal surely be charged therewith when first occasion doth serue against him.[3]

Richard’s fault, his usurpers repeatedly made clear, was that his advisers were egregiously corrupt personal friends who he had failed to correct.  In 1599, such passages could be (as they soon would be) construed as a demand that the Queen dismiss Robert Cecil, her right hand man, and replace him with the far more popular Essex.  In the end, this, Essex claimed, was the purpose of his rebellion.  Not to depose the Queen but to remove her corrupt advisers.

But Hayward was not likely the source of Elizabeth’s comment to Lambarde.  The first quarto of Shakespeare’s Richard II had been published some two years before Hayward.  That Hayward’s work agrees so completely with the play even suggests that he may have had the text beside him as he wrote.

What he didn’t have from the quarto was the deposition scene.  For some reason, two years before, the scene was already understood by the author to be too dangerous to publish.  It was so dangerous that it could only be published at the price of severe punishment.  Presumably, it could not be played at court, with or without the deposition scene, and could only be played in public with great care and without the scene.

But was it the cause of Elizabeth’s confidence that she was equated with Richard II among the intelligentsia of her kingdom?  Had the play so offended and frightened the Queen that Hayward suffered for it at a later date?  Had the Earl of Essex’s cohorts known the story of the fury the play caused upon its first being performed, and of the specific nature of the connection, real or imagined, between the Queen’s actions as monarch and those of Richard II?




[1] Shakespeare's Works. Edited by William J. Rolfe. Vol. VI. King John. King Richard II. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1884. 10.
[2] Ibid., 11.
[3] Hayward, John. The First Part of the Life And raigne of King Henrie the IIII. London: John Woolfe, 1599. 8-9.


  • Frederick Fleay's Metrical Table of Shakespeare's Plays. September 3, 2018. “What follows is the metrical table he presented to the New Shakespeare Society in an 1874 paper.[1]  The paper appears in the annual publications of Transactions for that year.  It is one of the great works of Shakespeare scholarship.”
  • Shakespeare’s King Richard II as Prequel. August 06, 2018. “It is for the same reason, more or less, that we must accept that Richard II was written before Henry V.  When the players replied to the Essex conspirators “that of King Richard as being so old and so long out of use” would not attract an audience, they were indeed referring to Shakespeare’s Richard II.  And they knew what they were talking about.”
  • Amurath III and The True Tragedy of Richard III. June 11, 2018. “So then, when Professor Mott honed this information, in his 1921 paper, the shock it created was not because verities were shattered.”
  • Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.




Monday, September 03, 2018

Frederick Fleay's Metrical Table of Shakespeare's Plays

Frederick Fleay is one of the great names of Shakespeare scholarship.  But he had peers.  The 19th (and early 20th) century was a golden age of Shakespeare scholarship.  He shared the heights with the likes of John Halliwell, Frederick Furnival, Charlotte Stokes, and Sidney Lee.  In the wider Elizabethan and early Stuart scholarship fields there is the towering Rev. A. B. Grosart, the carefully precise A. H. Bullen and W. W. Greg, many more.

Fleay was the data guru of the bunch, a hundred and fifty years before his time.  As the result of his work and influence the amateur scholar has an amount of data available without having him- or herself to undergo the weeks and months of tedious counting and creation of tables.

What follows is the metrical table he presented to the New Shakespeare Society in an 1874 paper.[1]  The paper appears in the annual publications of Transactions for that year.  It is one of the great works of Shakespeare scholarship.



This is not to say that his data led to perfect reasoning.  Fleay’s own interpretations amount to highly educated guesses as to what his data revealed.  The guesses had considerably a better chance of being correct, overall, but they remained guesses.

As for myself, I would argue with quite a lot of them.  Nevertheless, the data remains for what support it can give my alternative explanations.  For whatever answer will prove to be correct, in any related question, will have to agree with the data.

It is this that Fleay’s tables provide us.  They provide a precise, unassailable stock of evidence from which to begin a wide range of debates — against which to test one’s own theories. 

The replies of the other members of the Society that are printed together with Fleay’s paper make an important point.  Some members are careful to limit the damage the data might do to their favorite theories.  Others more disinterestedly probe the tables and the idea of data itself for weaknesses and limitations.

Alexander J. Ellis, of President of the Philological Society, is reported to have “dwelt upon”
the necessity of consulting the Quartos as well as the Folios, and not basing statistical inquiries upon any one critical edition—or, at least, separating the points relating to doubtful lines. He considered that we owed a great deal, indeed, to Mr Fleay; but more for initiating than for completing the work.

This is, of course, is something that all of us who avail ourselves of Fleay data cannot help but feel.  We need more.  We will always need more.  Fleay added to his original paper in his books.  Others were impressed with the method it all suggested and provided more data from their own tedious efforts at counting and categorizing.  They tend to write the best scholarly introductions — works that one keeps on a special shelf.  But still, what is clearest from the work of Frederick Fleay is how much the field suffers for the lack of readily available data.





[1] The New Shakespeare Society’s Transactions, 1874. 



  • 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.