Virtual Grub Street: 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 17^th 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 19^th 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.