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Monday, January 06, 2025

Updated Group Advertising Guidelines

We begin to have members sign-on who only wish to post direct advertisements for their products. Subsequently, it has become time to establish an advertising policy.


Foremost, no advertisements for weaponry of any sort will be permitted.

All direct advertising posts by persons who are not a member and who have not participated in the group by previously contributing at least an equal number of non-advertising content posts on the group topic(s) will be deleted. If you are not an actively posting member, your ads will be removed. A link to this policy will be posted in the “reason for deletion” section of each deleted advertisement.

Posting ads as "Anonymous participant" is not permitted. Such ads will be removed. Repeated posts as "Anonymous participant" will result in being blocked from the group.


All direct advertisements must strictly adhere to the group topic.  All direct advertisements in comment sections must strictly adhere to the topic of the associated post.


The member must post at least one non-advertising post on the group topic for every direct ad posted.  Multiple previous non-advertising posts do not count towards multiple advertising posts.  This means that posting two ads between which the advertising member has not posted at least one non-advertising post is against the rules.  No other member may post in order to meet the advertiser’s obligation.  The advertising member themselves must make the post.

Failure to post at least one non-advertising post as per the above rules will result in deletion of an ad.

 

The non-advertising post will not count towards the member’s obligation if it has previously been posted — if it is a repeat post.

 

No member is permitted to make a direct advertising post more often than twice per calendar month.  No direct advertising post for the same product will be posted more often than twice per calendar month. 


ADVERTISING LIMITS AND CONDITIONS MAY BE REVISED THEREFORE THE ADVERTISER IS ADVISED TO READ THIS NOTICE ON EACH OCCASION THEY THINK TO POST AN AD.


Legitimate non-advertising content that also advertises a member’s products or effort does not fall under this obligation.  This to say that posting a link to an article which includes advertising is not “direct” advertising and therefore does not fall under these guidelines.  Posting a one-off music or instructional/documentary video on the group topic is not “direct” advertising (even if it also includes a product link on its landing page).

The individual episodes of regularly scheduled weekly PODcasts can be advertised once per week.  The member advertising must still post another non-advertising post for each advertising post.


 

THESE GUIDELINES ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE.  ALWAYS READ THEM BEFORE POSTING AN AD.

 

DO NOT POST DIRECT ADVERTISING LINKS IN COMMENT SECTIONS UNLESS IT IS CLEARLY AN ADDITION TO THE SUBJECT BEING DISCUSSED. FOR EXAMPLE, A COMMENT CONSISTING OF AN EXTENDED ON-TOPIC QUOTE FROM A BOOK CAN INCLUDE A LINK TO THE BOOK'S PRODUCT PAGE.  OTHERWISE IT WILL BE REMOVED AND THE MEMBER WILL BE REMOVED FOR REPEATED INFRACTIONS.

 

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Saturday, January 04, 2025

Queen Elizabeth's 1564 Visit to Cambridge University, Edward de Vere and Shakespeare.

Upon Queen Elizabeth's arrival at Cambridge University, in August of 1564, several scholars from the school presented her with compositions they had written to celebrate her visit.

When her Majestie was about the middle of the Scholars or Sophisters, two appointed for the same, came forth and kneeled before her Grace; and kissing their papers exhibited the same unto her Majestic. Wherein were contained two orations gratulatory; the one in verse, the other prose. Which her Highness received, and gave them to one of the footmen. The like was observed and done by the Batchellours of Arts; and of two Masters of Arts.1

One of the two Batchelors was a young William Lewin. One of the Masters was Thomas Drant fellow of St. John's College. Behind the Queen rode her proudest Earls, among them the 14 year old Earl of Oxford.

Like so many other scholars at the English universities of the day, their names will enter in the historical record as servants, agents, tutors, etc. — minor figures first met during a visitation to the given college. Only on rare occasion was the visitation a royal one. Various august members of the royal court might pass through at any time. Prize scholars would be appointed to regale them. Their names would some 10 or 20 years later appear as a secretary to the visitor, perhaps, or a tutor to his children. A visit from the powerful was a cherished opportunity for advancement.

The Cambridge visit being a royal one, and the university being a premiere institution, unusually many names appear again. William Lewin, for example, will impress Sir William Cecil, the august First Secretary to the Queen, who will choose him as tutor to his daughter, Anne.2 Anne, of course, will marry Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, in 1571, after which she will write from Wivenhoe — the Earl's preferred seat, at the time — asking her father to recommend Lewin for a grant from the Queen.

But we next see Lewin described as a servant of Oxford. He is chosen to accompany the young Earl on a tour of Europe. The two wait upon the court of France for a short time before traveling to Strasbourg where they become house guests of the famous scholar, Johannes Sturmius.

Famously, Vere suspected Lewin — correctly as it turned out — had been sent along to inform Cecil (by then the Baron Burghley), of his activities. Lewin woke one morning — after the end of the Frankfort Fair — to discover Vere gone having left no clues to which direction. By way of consolation prize, Lewin seems to have remained to learn at Sturmius' feet for a year or so before returning to England. There he appears to have become a secretary to Edmund Grindal — the Archbishop of Canterbury and close friend of William Cecil. He also acted as Sturmius agent with the English royal court.

As for Thomas Drant, he managed somehow to become an influence on the works of Shakespeare. I have described, in my edition of Vere's Ulysses & Agamemnon (1584)3, how he presented an English poem to the Queen on the occasion of her visit, and how, two years later, 'In 1566, a Cambridge student, Thomas Drant, published his A medicinable morall, that is, the two bookes of Horace his satyres, Englyshed,... The book was dedicated to “The Right Honorable my Lady Bacon, and my lady Cicell, sisters, fauourers of learnyng and vertue.”.'

While Drant's translation is written in fourteeners, it shares striking stylistic and vocabulary traits with Shakespeare. His next translation — of Horace's Art of Poetry4 — also in fourteeners, was very loose. Portions could easily be added to the literature on Shakespeare's free use of prefix and suffix coinages. Similarities of style and vocabulary are found to Edward de Vere's Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584) which would later be incorporated into Troilus and Cressida.5

Drant graduated D.D., from Cambridge, in 1569. Soon thereafter, he became private chaplain to Edmund Grindal, the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was likely at about the same time that he was named Archdeacon of Lewes, which was in the gift of Canterbury. His short life ended in 1578.

Short though his life may have been, Drant wrote many (brief) Latin works and the aforesaid translations from Horace. He also made many connections and effected the literary world around him. According to Seccomb and Allen, Drant “drew up rules whereby English might be tortured into pentameters and sapphics, and his rules were very seriously considered by Dyer and by Sidney.”6

For our present purposes, Horace's Epistle to Lollius, or Drant's translation of it, have a strong claim to forming the character of Achilles in Edward de Vere's Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584).7

The hystorye of Parys love, (for which as we do heare

Greate Gréece empayred verye sore, which wreakinge Parys sinnes

Did wayne awaye with ten yeares fighte prolongde by lingeringe twynnes)

Of foolishe kinges and foolishe folke conteynes a fumishe flame.

Antenor would have compremize to cut awaye the same.

What saies our Parys? what sayes he? compell him shall theire none

To cease to bathe in worldlye blis, and flow in joy alone.

Duke Nestor sillie carkinge segge the tempeste to appease

He cummes, and goes, twixte king of men and awfull Achilles.

The kinge for love, both twayne for ire are in a chafinge fitt

What so the princes dote in lyfe, the commons smarte for it.

Throughe treason crafte, mischiefe, and luste, through wrothe of stomacke stowte,

Theye spare no sinne within Troye walles, nor none they spare without.8

He has also become a front-runner for influencing Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, I.i.8-9:

Like to a Step-dame, or a Dowager,

Long withering out a yong mans revennew.

This was long thought to have been directly influenced by Horace's Ars Poetica until James Halliwell discovered that Drant's translation of the passage was a still closer fit.

Ut piger

Annus Pupillis, quos dura prerait custodia matrum.

Sic mihi tarda fluunt, ingrataque tempora.

Thus translated by Drant, 1.567, —

Slowe seames the yeare unto the warde

Which houlden downe must be,

In custodie of stepdame straite, —

Slowe slydes the time to me. 9

Edward de Vere's Ulysses & Agamemnon (1584)!

What is of even greater interest, Drant was in the habit of maintaining his iambic foot through coining new words by adding prefixes or suffixes to their base. It is a habit he continues even in his original Latin poetry.

The student of Shakespeare will surely notice that this innovation has long been credited to him. But here is Drant overflowing, in 1567, with: unassayde; unfalliablie; “Lyke beastes unbroake, unusde to toyle, Bruits of untamed neckes,...”; upmost; updrest; dehuskd; “The head detruncte...” and much more. Add to this that the translations will share highly unique vocabulary and images with Vere's Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584).



1Cooper, Charles Henry. The Annals of Cambridge (1843). II.188.

2Strype, John. Annals of... Queen Elizabeth's Happy Reign. (1824). III.i.81. This presumably after he took his LL.D.

3Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584) (The Early Plays of Edward de Vere (William Shakespeare) Book 1)(2018). Location 6465ff. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JD7KM1T/

4Drant, Thomas. Horace his arte of Poetrie, [E]pistles, and Satyrs Englished (1567)

5Purdy, Location 6023. 'Stokes, x.] It has often been remarked that passages and even scenes in Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida," as printed in the Quarto and the Folio, seem to be boulders from an older drama embedded in the newer and more celebrated formation.'

6Seccomb, Thomas and Allen, J. W. The Age of Shakespeare (1579-1631)(1903). I.9.

7Later incorporated into Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.

8Drant. “Epistle to Lollius”. No page numbers.

9Halliwell, James O. The Works of William Shakespeare... a New Collation (1856). 29-30.


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Sunday, December 29, 2024

An Apology for the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page.

It has been more than 10 years now since I published Edward de Vere was Shakespeare: at long last the proof. I offered it as a short biography to introduce a Collected Poems of William Shakespeare. The two would form a single volume when the work was completed.

I realized that the poems would require considerable effort. While I was assembling those with which I was familiar I would search for others with which I was not.

It took several grueling and glorious months of seclusion to draw together years of notes into Edward de Vere was Shakespeare. Another 10 years later the Collected Poems is still in-progress. The research for it has resulted in a number of 20,000+ word studies that I have published under my Virtual Vanaprastha label.

What this process has made clear is that the original concept is too inclusive to be realized in a single volume, or even two. My intention had been to gather poems and critical commentary into the promised Collected Poems. While this remains the general plan, the process has revealed that the steps necessary in order to accomplish it are themselves made up of steps requiring considerable attention to detail. The final text must be developed through the short essays I provide for free through my Virtual Grub Street blog and various Facebook groups and pages, and, further, through further 20,000+ word thematic studies.

While I am working at several new 20,000+ word studies, then, there is still work that must be done in as timely a manner as possible towards the final Collected Poems. At the same time, there is the need to fulfill the on-going requirement for free short essays to gratify, inform and advertise. I have decided, therefore, to begin presenting the text of the individual poems variorum-style on my Virtual Grub Street blog, as free articles, and linking to them from the Edward de Vere was Shakespeare Facebook Group and Book Page. In this way I will be able to satisfy the demand for new essays on the Shakespeare Authorship Question while I undertake the vast labor of bringing together and organizing my great mass of notes.

This intermediate effort is the reason I have created the new V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page [link]. I intend to gather hyperlinks to all of my Virtual Grub Street essays on the poems of Shakespeare onto this index. A poem at a time, it will become an table-of-contents to a considerable amount of my in-progress work toward the Collected Poems of William Shakespeare.

This beyond the extensive information I have provided in the following completed 20,000+ word studies:


Edward de Vere was Shakespeare: at long last the proof (2013, 2017) in which I show composition dates and recipients of numerous Shakespeare sonnets. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1543136257/

Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say? (2015) In which I show that the monument poems were written not to the Earl of Southampton but to Queen Elizabeth I and reveal the identity of the Rival Poet. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TWPBPP8/

Discovered: A New Shakespeare Sonnet (or three, actually)(2015), in which I reveal three new Shakespeare sonnets previously assigned to another Elizabethan poet. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1514750406/

Shakespeare in 1573: Apprenticeship and Scandal (2021), in which I show that dozens of the poems in an anthology entitled An Hundreth Sundrie Flowers, many of them in the form we now call the “Shakespearean sonnet,” were written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. Also that many of them have stylistic traits we associate with the works of William Shakespeare. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B096GSQV14/

Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say?

Those who have been following my in-progress work on the subject, to date, have been presented with powerful evidence that the sonnets refer to the name “William Shakespeare” as being the pen-name of the author of the plays and sonnets. Also that a sonnet is addressed to the son of Edward de Vere that died shortly after birth, in 1583; that another refers to his son, Henry, who lived to adulthood and another to the wound he received in a duel, in 1582. Much more lies ahead.

Inasmuch as possible, the poems will be presented, in variorum-style, with notes on the details of the text together with commentary by scholars of every stripe (including myself). While they will serve me as notes toward my final product they are designed to serve you, the reader, as finished products filled to the brim with high quality content. As the number of essays grows, the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page [link] will become a free online book on Selected Poems by Edward de Vere, also known as William Shakespeare.

A note for those virtual teeth-gnashing, eye-bulging Authorship partisans who thought the “apology” in the title of this essay was going to be their long-awaited mea culpa, I remind them that “apology,” in scholarly terms, is a different thing.

Apology (O.E.D.) = 2. explanation of a course of action.

Oh well! There's always hope!



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Sunday, December 22, 2024

The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 134.

 



134

SO now I have confest that he is thine,

And I my selfe am morgag’d to thy will,

My selfe lie forfeit, so that other mine,                 3

Thou wilt restore to be my comfort still:

But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free,

For thou art covetous, and he is kinde,                  6

He learnd but suretie-like to write for me,

Under that bond that him as fast doth binde.

The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,             9

Thou usurer that put’st forth all to use,

And sue a friend, came debter for my sake,

So him I loose through my unkinde abuse.             12

Him have I lost, thou hast both him and me,

He paies the whole, and yet am I not free.



2. will] Lee (Fortnightly, 1898, LXIX, 220) explains as mortgaged “to her personality in which ‘will,’ in the double sense of stubbornness and sensual passion is the strongest element.”—Will can mean “carnal desire or appetite,” according to N. E. D. (1926), which gives only two modern examples, both from Sh. It could also mean here “intention,” “purpose.”

3. other mine] Dowden (1881) That other mine, that other myself, my alter ego.—Stopes (1901) "That other mine," my friend, who is myself.—Beeching (1904): That other who is mine.—Pooler (ed. 1918): That other myself. [He compares 133.6.]—Tucker (1924) says that it “cannot” have this last meaning. He oddly substitutes, “That remainder of what is mine.”

7, 8.] Tucker (1924): He had not been taught the full meaning of the document which he was endorsing.

7-14.] L. J. Mills (One Soul, 1937, p. 241): The suggestion is that the friend had gone to woo the lady for the poet and, according to friendship convention (as in [Greene’s] Tullies Loue [Ciceronis Amor, 1589]), the lady fell in love with the messenger.

11, 14.] Stopes (1881): Cp. the position of Antonio in the Merchant of Venice.


9.] Malone (1780): Statute has here its legal signification, that of a security or obligation for money.—Verity (1890): You will put the statute into execution and claim the letter of your bond, like a very Shylock.

10. use] Malone (1790): Usance.—Schmidt (1875): Interest paid for borrowed money.

11. came] became

12.] my unkinde abuse] Pooler (1918): The unkind abuse or ill-treatment which I have received from you; “my ” = inflicted on me.—Tucker (1924): Viz. in allowing him to become surety.

14.] Pooler (1918): As surety he is liable for my debt, but we should not both have to pay.



Commentary:



Von Mauntz [thinks that this sonnet is addressed by a woman to her rival, and that in lines 7-8 she speaks of her marriage contract. (Jahrb., 28: 274)]


Lee (1907): The legal terminology in . . . [134, as in 87] closely resembles that employed by Barnes in his Parthenophil [1593], Sonnets viii, ix, and xi, where “mortgage,” “bail,” “forfeit,” “forfeiture,” “deed of gift” are all applied to the mistress’ hold on the lover’s heart.


Tucker (1924): [134 has] a humorous vein of double meaning. The woman has compelled both men to render carnal service to her beauty. She insists upon having in that relation the friend as well as the poet, whose service does not satisfy her claim. He playfully pleads that his friend has merely acted for him (cf. 40.5-6), and that he is quite willing to take the whole burden upon himself, if she will give up the friend. But neither she nor the friend is so inclined.


Tyler (1890): If 134 is to be taken as resting on a basis of fact, it would seem that it was on some business of Shakespeare's that Herbert first went to the lady. Possibly he went to see Mrs. Fitton as a friend of Shakespeare.


Archer (1897): So much for the Dedication ; let us now turn to the sonnet-group 134 to 136. The first lines of 134 are these :—

" So now I have confessed that he is thine,

And I myself am mortgaged to thy will."

Given Shakespeare's inveterate habit of quibbling upon words, this alone would suggest that the Young Man's name was Will, the implication being that the poet is bound in a double servitude to his mistress's will, and to her Will, his friend. This, however, would be no more than a conjecture, were it not that the poet himself points our attention to the quibble in the very next sonnet, in which he dwells upon it from first to last, emphasizing it with capitals and italics.

*

However in comprehensible may be the comfort Shakespeare professed to find in the fact, sonnets 134, 135, and 136 make it as clear as daylight that the name of the friend who " robbed " him of his mistress was the same as his own.


Was Shakespeare Gay? What Do the Sonnets Really Say?

Bennett (2007): Now that he has admitted that his friend is bound to the mistress too, he wants to make a bargain for his friend’s freedom. He will forfeit himself if she will restore “that other mine” (the friend) to him as a “comfort” (ll. 3-4). In other words, the speaker needs to make his soul whole again.


GWP: Sonnet 134 is equal in importance to any in the Oxfordian text. It's relationship to the sonnets immediately before and after show it one of a number on Vere and his "friend," Shakespeare, being thralls to the beauty of Elizabeth Trentham. The reader may recall Sonnet 42, also on the theme:

But here’s the ioy, my friend and I are one,...

Shot through with double-entendre, the theme and its resolution are so clever that Vere treated his wife and other readers to it numerous times. On this occasion, the ironic meaning of the ending of 42 (which is a riddle, actually) is reinforced by line 7:

He learnd but suretie-like to write for me,...

Again, a very clever description of a pen-name. Vere's friend is the personification of his pen-name.

There is much more happening here if we include the commentary. All of it is by traditional scholars unaffected by the Authorship Question. Read over, however, that commentary agrees resoundingly that Shakespeare's friend is somehow his alter ego — is also himself.

Beyond the commentary, the reader may notice that Elizabeth has taken a role similar to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. The legal references in that play are not to Venetian law but to the Common Law Vere was taught at Gray's Inn. The application of contract Common Law to lovers' promises is far-and-away the signature legal image found throughout the works of Shakespeare.

It is also the image by which I identify the sonnet I present in my Discovered: A New Shakespeare Sonnet (or three, actually)(2015).1



Sources:


Alden, Raymond Macdonald. The Sonnets of Shakespeare (1916).

Archer, William. “Shakespeare's Sonnets. The Case Against Southampton.” The Fortnightly

Review. Vol. 62. (1897). 817-834.

Beeching, H.C. The Sonnets of Shakespeare (1904).

Bennett, Keneth C. Threading Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2007)

Dowden, Ernst. The Sonnets of Shakespeare (1881).

Lee, Sidney. Complete Works of William Shakespeare (1907)

Malone, Edmund. Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, with the corrections and illustrations of various commentators (etc.) (1821).

Mills, L. J. One Soul in Bodies Twain. (1937).

Pooler, C. Knox. The Works of Shakespeare: Sonnets (1918).

Rendall, Gerald. Shakespeare Sonnets and Edward de Vere (1930).

Rollins, Hyder. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. The Sonnets. (1944).

Stopes, Charlotte Carmichael. Shakespeare's Sonnets (1901).

Tucker, T. G. The Sonnets of Shakespeare (1924).

Tyler, Thomas. Shakespeare's Sonnets (1890).

Verity, A. W. Works of W. Sh. Edited by Henry Irving and Frank A. Marshall. Sonnets in volume 8. Introduction and notes by A. W. Verity. (1890).

Von Mauntz, Alfred. “Sh.'s Lyrische Gedichte,” Jahrbuch, 28: 274. (1893)




1 Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Discovered: A New Shakespeare Sonnet (or three, actually)(2015). https://www.amazon.com/Discovered-Shakespeare-Sonnet-three-actually/dp/1514750406/



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Sunday, December 15, 2024

Why Shakespeare was Correct: Bohemia did have a seacoast.

A member of my Edward de Vere was Shakespeare Facebook Group asked, some two months ago, now, “...can anyone point me to documentation about Bohemia having a seacoast in the 16th century?” She was the member of another group that was reading Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.

Surely they have finished reading the play by now (some two months later) but the question of the Bohemian seacoast has lingered for centuries now (since a comment by Ben Jonson) without a definitive answer. It is much bigger than a reading group question. As it turned out, I found myself making my way through a particularly dense historical thicket. The question revealed itself to actually be several questions. I could only forge onward on the chance that I might reach the answers to those several questions surrounding Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale that have evaded those who came before.

The first question is: What is the source of Shakespeare's play? The answer is that the main source of the plot comes from Robert Greene's Pandosto, the Triumph of Time (1588). The first edition of this work appeared in 1588. According to Bullough:

Shakespeare's main source was Robert Greene's romance, Pandosto, the Triumph of Time, which had as running title “The History of Dorastus and Fawnia”. Editions of this popular work appeared in 1592, 1595, 1607, and often later.1 

P. G. Thomas adds “editions of 1614, 1632, 1636, 1648, 1688, 1696 and 1703.”2

A key line in the 1588, edition reads “the King shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found.”3 Beginning with the 1607, all further editions read “the King shall die without an heir”. The line in The Winter's Tale reads “the King shall liue without an Heire, if that which is lost, be not found.”4 For this reason, Shakespeare's play is understood by many to have been based upon one of the 1588, 1592, or 1595 editions of the Greene novel.

Next question: Does Pandosto feature a Bohemian seacoast? In Pandosto we find the following:

they got to the sea shore; where, with many a bitter curse taking their leave of Bohemia, they went aboard.

There are other references to the seacoast, as well. Pandosto, the king of Bohemia is hosting his childhood friend, Egistus, king of Sicily. Because Shakespeare follows his source, his play, too, features a seashore.

Antigonus. Thou art perfect then, our ship hath toucht upon
The Desarts of Bohemia.

But his play begins not hosting the king of Sicily in Bohemia but the king of Bohemia in Sicily. It is difficult to imagine any other reason for this than that he knew or suspected that Bohemia did not have a seacoast in the immediate vicinity of the royal palace as of the time the play was being written.

Regardless, the only way Shakespeare could place the baby girl where Florizell, the prince of Bohemia, could meet and fall in love with her, some 16 years later, was to have the ship that was carrying her deposit her on a shore in faraway Bohemia. On each disparate shore, Greene and Shakespeare had the babe discovered by a shepherd who took her home to his wife. In both, the old couple brought her up as their own.

It is likely that one or more of three options explains this first part of our inquiry. Shakespeare either 1) wanted to keep Bohemia in the play, regardless that it had no coast, so his audience would connect it with the highly popular novel Pandosto; or, 2) didn't know or care whether Bohemia had a seacoast, from time to time, in history, or not. (It was, after all, a play not a geography lesson); or, 3) decided that there was a seacoast near enough Bohemia to serve in a pinch so long as the baby's destination was a desert distant from land-locked Bohemia-proper. Options 1 & 3 seem likely, option 2 quite possible.

Actually, the author with a major problem, geographically speaking, was Greene, who had the tiny babe float in a tiny boat for two days in order to arrive in Sicily.

at last let us come to shew the tragical discourse of the young infant. Who being tossed with wind and wave floated two whole days without succour, ready at every puff to be drowned in the sea, till at last the tempest ceased and the little boat was driven with the tide into the coast of Sicilia, where sticking upon the sands it rested.

Writing a fairy tale, of sorts, he may have reasoned, the tiny boat could safely transport the babe wherever he wished in however impossibly short a time.

Like many such incongruities, Greene's will provide clues that allow us painstakingly to untangle the thicket of which I have spoken. A thicket so tangled that I have spent many hours of spare time (actually, there is no such thing in my life), for these two past months, sputtering and struggling to get through to the other side.

First, how did Greene get his Bohemian seacoast? Upon the death of Boleslau III, king of Poland, in 1138, Poland was divided into five principalities, ruled by his four eldest sons. This greatly weakened the country. It was soon a country no longer, but, rather, an area fractured into shifting duchies and principates. One of those duchies was Silesia. It, the pieces of Poland, and their neighbor, Bohemia, fluctuated in the amount of territory each commanded, and, thus, claimed, during any period of time from 1138 to the early-15th century.

The borders of these duchies with neighboring Germany, was marked by the Oder River. Germany controlled the west bank and German was the common language there. The various duchies/principates controlled various portions of the east bank at different times. Most often, Bohemia and/or Silesia controlled the east bank. They and/or Denmark controlled the city and port of Szczecin, at the mouth of the Oder, at any given time. Even when control of the east bank was uncertain, the locals continued to speak the Silesian dialect of the Slavic language.

The Oder River delta formed the Szczecin lagoon, at its mouth, on the seaside of which was the port for the region. The lagoon was rimmed by what the Latin writers of the Chronicles of the Time (Greene's source, to which we will return) would often refer to a des(i)ertus. To them it meant “scrub land” rather than desert. At the end of the Oder River, then, was the Bohemian seaport of Szczecin. 

This only begins to describe the alternative possibilities of where Shakespeare's desert came from (there is no desert in what remains of Greene's text) and Shakespeare appears to have known nothing of Silesian chronicles. From just where the desert might have come is an interesting subject in itself which must wait its turn in the infamous interminable queue.

There is no reason to believe that Shakespeare knew Greene's source much less had read it. His choices seem to have been entirely exigent. Greene's novel was so popular that the playwright desired to keep the connection between it and his play clear by having the baby girl sail between Sicily and Bohemia.

It is also clear that Robert Greene took portions of his tale from old Silesian chronicles that he did not feel the need to understand with precision. I look forward to provide an explanation of the relationship between the two as time permits (vide "interminable queue" supra).



Given the level of stylistic maturity of The Winter's Tale, and the quote mentioned above, it seems likely that the play was composed following the release of the 1596 edition of the novel. Like the early version of The Merchant of Venice (known by the title The Jew),5 an earlier could well have been staged in 1589 and revised for production in 1596. External references suggest it was brought on the stage of the Globe in 1612 for a run following the release of the 1607 edition of the novel. 

Among the references implying a 16th century run are several in a novel entitled The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania (1621) as I have revealed in my recent book Shakespeare's The Tempest: a Wedding Masque for Susan de Vere (2024).6 Of course, the Countess of Montgomery was Susan de Vere, the daughter of Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.

Ironically, then, Shakespeare was right for all the wrong reasons. During the time of the chronicles, which were the main source of Robert Green's Pandosto, Bohemia had a seacoast. Orders of magnitude more ironic, we will next see that Greene was wrong about it having a seacoast. Go figger.



1 Bullough, Geoffrey. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare: Romances (1957). 118.

2 Thomas, P. G. Greene's 'Pandosto' Or 'Dorastus And Fawnia' Being The Original Of Shakespeare's 'Winter's Tale' (1907). ix.

3 Thomas, 26.

4 A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale. Horace Howard Furness, ed. (1928), III.ii.143-4.

5 Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. The Tempest: a Wedding Masque for Susan de Vere (2024). ii.37. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CY5YYG1F/

6 Purdy, Tempest. ii.10-12.

[General note] The observations on the language and political situations on the banks of the Oder River incorporate considerable information from: 

Kamusella, Tomasz. "The Changing Lattice of Languages, Borders, and Identities in Silesia". The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Identities and Borders (2016). 

Also from one or more medieval Polish and Silesian chronicles which will be explained as time comes available. 





Also at Virtual Grub Street:


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