On the Possibility that Edward de Vere and Shakspere of Stratford Shared a Beer in Southwark.

In this series:

• Shakespeare Authorship, March the 17th and Social Media.
• On the Possibility that Edward de Vere and Shakspere of Stratford Shared a Beer in Southwark.

Just why Shakespeare chose to locate so many plays in Italy and how he came across so much information about the country have long been the subject of scholarly debate. For traditional Stratfordian scholars, the questions presented an interesting specialty within the field. But, once the Shakespeare Authorship Debate became a thing, that curious little sideline became a battle-line.

Candidates that had not traveled in Italy during their lives — specifically, the Stratford man — found their flank exposed. Many of the alternative candidates descended upon it with Italian banners streaming behind them.

The Stratfordians, for their part, reinforced that flank with generalizations some even valid. Who could prove that they were not true, after all? Shakespeare could, indeed, have picked up facts about Italy from merchant sailors by hanging out at London dockyard taverns. Already, inexplicable language capabilities had been explained away by Ben Jonson translating key classical language texts for him, John Florio doing the same for Italian, etc. Problematical knowledge of content from foreign books of various languages are also theorized to have come from English translations surely many hundreds of which have left behind no trace.

Humble Stratfordian, though he was, his genius, we are assured, could have recommended him to the company of the noble and wealthy who had traveled to the country. Readers are informed that young Englishmen of wealthy families had begun doing “The Grand Tour” of Europe since early in the 16^th century. There were plenty of raconteurs eager to tell the stories of their travels in Italy freighted with curious detail.

But the tour actually only began to be a thing some hundred years later. Those who traveled to Europe in the 16^th and the first half of the 17^th centuries tended, as the rule, to travel with business and/or diplomatic delegations that offered them life experience in exchange for secretarial and other duties. The tour, on the other hand, was a private affair accompanied by best friend and tutor/chaperone.

Those 16^th century travelers for business likely disembarked at the great port of Antwerp. Those for diplomacy, at Calais where they proceeded to Paris and Lyon. Those very few who were so hardy as to travel for pleasure would also make their way to Paris. Those planning to continue to Italy, as did Edward de Vere, the young 17^th Earl of Oxford, in 1575, might schedule their trip in order to cross into Germany by coach — a convenience not yet available in England — in time to spend at least a few days at the great Frankfort Fair where they would marvel at the thousands of books for sale surrounded by every kind of merchandise, food and entertainment.

Those, like the young Earl, who were sufficiently wealthy, would also visit the stables where some of the finer horses on the continent would be gathered for sale. A newly purchased mount would carry them in sufficient style and comfort to Augsburg from where man and horse would begin the journey south, through the Brenner Pass, across the Swiss Alps, into northern Italy. Perhaps in the company of German Jews headed back from their business at the fair to the Venetian Ghetto.

Shylock. Why there, there, there, there, a diamond gone

cost me two thousand ducats in Franckford,...¹

It seems that Shakespeare knew something of these matters, as well.

In the Italy in which Romeo and Juliet is set, wealthy gentiles' homes featured impressive balconies overlooking gardens. In the home of the wealthy Jew, in the claustrophobic Venetian Ghetto, his daughter must stick her head out a casement window into a common street for her view of Carnival revelers.

Shylock. Clamber not you up to the casements then,

Nor thrust your head into the publique streete

To gaze on Christian fooles with varnisht faces²

Such small touches suggest direct personal experience. When her gentile lover arrives, she must lower her father's riches from a window because the houses have no doors to the outside of the ghetto. It will soon be full night and no Jews allowed outside of the Ghetto so she must dress as a gentile and hurry out the ghetto gate.

On the other hand, Oxfordians might struggle to explain the trial between Antonio and Shylock being heard before the Doge, with the Council of Ten seated behind him, as in a great matter of state, not as an error, but as a conscious dramatic fiction. It could not have been the case in Venice but surely must be the case on a stage.

Shakespeare wrote plays not travelogues or cultural anthropology. Furthermore, the stages upon which plays were then performed did not yet feature scenery or much in the way of props to suggest a foreign place. Italy must be evoked largely by speeches describing merchant ships laden with exotic cargoes, off-hand reference to exotic place names, like “Rialto,” and currency names like “ducats”.

All parties — whoever their candidate as author — struggle, as the rule, with Portia's instructions to her friend Balthazar, if they notice the reference to “the Tranect”.

Now Balthaser, as I have ever found thee honest true,

So let me finde thee still: take this same letter,

And use thou all the indeavour of a man

In speed to Mantua³, see thou render this

Into my cosins hand, Doctor Belario,

And looke what notes and garments he doth give thee,

Bring them I pray thee with imagin'd speed

Unto the Tranect, to the common Ferrie

Which trades to Venice; waste no time in words

But get thee gone, I shall be there before thee.⁴

The term “Tranect” probably comes from the Latin trans-necto, “to connect across”. It is only known to exist, in print, in Shakespeare's play. The reference to the “common ferry” only tends to confuse the matter.

The ferry referred to is the ferry at the terminus of the Brenta canal, at Fusina, in southern Venice. The final change in altitude across the Tranect of the canal, at Marghera, to the beginning of the canal-section toward Fusina, is too steep to achieve via a lock system.⁵ This obstacle was overcome by the use of ingeniously designed canal boats (“cars”) with detachable wheels, that were rolled onto a wooden platform and lowered by winches, from the top of a dam, at the end of the main section of the Brenta canal, to descend to the mouth of the section toward Fusina.

The Earl of Oxford would have taken this route in 1575, as would Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, (who called the stop “Chaffousine” rather than Marghera) some five years later.

Chaffousine, which is naught but an inn, and here we took boat for Venice. Here they bring ashore all the boats with machinery and pulleys worked by two horses after the fashion of an oil mill. They move their boats by means of wheels placed underneath, which run along planks and thereby convey them over to the canal which runs into the sea on which Venice is situated. We took dinner at Chaffousine, and, having embarked in a gondola, arrived at Venice in time for supper after travelling five miles.⁶

Montaigne did not own the horses his party was riding: they were rented “post horses”. Therefore, they rode them from Padua (the beginning of the canal), rather than taking a canal boat, and turned them in at the inn at the Tranect, without needing to arrange to dispense with them.

All indications are that Oxford timed his trip to buy a horse at the fair as young noblemen often did. Padua made excellent business being the last market at which to sell these temporary trans-Alpine horses before continuing toward Venice where horses were not permitted. From there he would have taken a canal boat to the Tranect where he would surely have found the manner of lowering the “cars” at the very least curious. Perhaps he mentioned it to Shakspere of Stratford some evening as the two shared a beer at a tavern in London's Southwark theater district.

1Merchant of Venice, III.i.79-80.

2MoV, II.v.33-5.

3It is repeated elsewhere in the play that Dr. Bellario resides not in Mantua but in Padua (were Italy's most prodigious law school was located at the time).

4MoV, III.iv.48-57.

5Those who have read my monograph Back When Ophelia Jumped Off a Cliff: the Hamlet of 1589 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09WC94FGW/) will already be aware of the vestigial reference to the canal cars at Marghera in the earliest versions of Hamlet.

6The Journal of Montaigne's Travels in Italy by Way of Switzerland and Germany (1903) transl. Waters, W.G. II.13-4.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• Invention in a Noted Weed: the Poetry of William Shakespeare. September 21, 2024. “The coward conquest of a wretches knife,...”

• The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 108. Edward de Vere to his son, Henry. “That may expresse my love, or thy deare merit?”

• Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

• Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.

• 

Hartmut Ilsemann's Stylometrics, Edward de Vere, George Chapman and Anthony Munday.

In researching matters around the play Fidele and Fortunio: Two Italian Gentlemen, published in London, in 1585, I was presented with a variety of computer analyses comparing the play to several by Chapman and by Munday. For the main analysis, word frequencies and n-grams were compared. “Munday’s John a Kent and John a Cumber (1587?) and The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington (1598) were not in the database,” therefore a second comparison was made employing the Wcopyfind plagiarism program.

Chapman and Munday were chosen for comparison because each has been forwarded as the author of the play at one time or another. Munday's initials were long rumored to appear on a dedication letter in the front of a copy of the play that had since disappeared. A quote from F&F appeared under Chapman's name in Robert Allot's England's Parnassus.¹

The particular methodologies applied went by names such as “nearest shrunken centroid,” “support vector machine,” and “Burrowsian Delta methodology”. The author of the study was Hartmut Ilsemann of English Department of Leibniz University, Hannover² — by all appearances, a respected expert in such matters.

A 17-page overview of Mr. Ilsemann's computer analysis, informs us that he has been introduced to this play and most of his background information by a 1915 article, by one T. M. Parrott, in the journal Modern Philology entitled “The Authorship of Two Italian Gentlemen”.³ Tellingly, among the sources Ilsemann cites for his paper no actual plays by Munday or Chapman are listed. These have been “read” only by the computer programs which he uses.

Those who have followed my work on computer stylometrics know that I have ascribed its manifold failures in our realm to a lack of background knowledge about Tudor and Stuart literature. Unfortunately, n-grams have led us astray once again. According to Mr. Ilsemann:

The clearest verdict can be found in the Růžička metric with words, word bigrams and character trigrams. They are very clear in their choice of Chapman.

A wholly objective scholar does not make findings. The n-grams do. Luckily, we can now remove all flesh and blood — all bias — and, thereby, all question.

For his part, Mr. Ilsemann does intersperse wide ranging generalities about qualities in the work of Munday and Chapman but they are so insubstantial that they provide no operable facts. He informs his reader that:

Stylistically, thematically, and rhetorically, Fidele and Fortunio aligns well with Chapman’s early work. It feels like an experimental play by a young, intellectually ambitious author — consistent with Chapman’s emerging voice in the 1580s–90s.⁴

What does “an experimental play by a young, intellectually ambitious author” feel like? If the n-grams gave the “clearest verdict” for Munday, surely the play would feel like “a poorly written play by a young ambitious author,” or thereabouts

Our dispassionate scholar clearly has not read any considerable amount from the works of either author much less from the corpus of late 16^th century Elizabethan theater. Nor has he brought such expertise onboard.

Mr. Ilsemann would seem to have no partisan interest of any sort except one. He is dedicated to the proposition — so often disproven — that the authorship of any text can be determined solely from the computer-mathematical analysis of word frequencies and n-grams.

Before we even get to issues of textual evidence, however, we must address a mortal flaw in Isleman's paper. Mr. Parrott's fine article was published in 1915. At that point, only one damaged copy of the play was known to exist. That copy lacked the front matter (title-page, etc.). In 1933, The Malone Society's W. W. Greg announced the physical discovery of two more rumored copies with front matter intact. Parrott had been all but certain that the rumored copies did not actually exist.

The title page of both copies advertised that it was:

Translated out of Italian, and set downe according as it hath beene presented before the Queenes moste excellent Maiestie.⁵

One copy included a dedication to a “Maister John Heardson”, signed “Your woorships to his power. A. M.”

Among the many facts that contradict Mr. Ilsemann's computer analysis is that John Heardson was the younger brother of Thomas Herdson, one of a long line of Herdsons prominent in the Drapers Guild, in London and Kent.⁶ Anthony Munday was the son of Christopher Munday a member of the Drapers Guild who practiced the trade of printing. Anthony worked hard to maintain connections with the Drapers, as well as the nobility of England, through the dedications to his works, and was by all appearances a member of the Drapers throughout his life as well.

By the 1588 publication of A banquet of daintie conceits, a dizygotic twin of our play, A.M. is signing himself, on the title page, “seruaunt to the Queenes most excellent Maiestie.” He is also wielding Anthony Munday's signature motto, taken from Cicero: Honos Alit Artes (“Honor Nurtures the Arts”). For the next decade his title pages would declare him to be a “Messenger of her Maiesties chamber”.⁷

By best evidence, in 1584/5 George Chapman was a servant to Ralph Sadler, an officer of the court. He had borrowed a considerable amount from a loan shark in order to equip himself for the position. Sadler died early in 1587. Like a great many young men deeply indebted through their failed attempts to gain status, Chapman hired himself out as a soldier to fight in the Netherlands. No literary product is generally attributed to him until 1594 (10 years after F&F was acted before the queen).

Folgerpedia for 1584 states that F&F was probably the play performed by the Children of the Chapel Royal on February 2^nd as part of the festivities surrounding the ceremonial knighting of the new Mayor of London, Edward Osborne, of the Clothworkers Company — upon what evidence they do not say. The high number of Latin squibs in the play does strongly suggest that it was written to be performed by the Children for whom Latin was often included in their plays in order to allow them to proudly display their learning before a highly educated audience. Public playing companies avoided foreign languages the which tended to turn away audiences. University plays were generally entirely in Latin in order to provoke a higher level of fluency.

The Children's performances were held at Blackfriars theater. Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, held the lease of the Blackfriars at the time and chose the plays performed together with his secretary, John Lyly. Prior to becoming a messenger of the queen's chamber, Munday proudly and constantly announced on his title pages that he was a servant to the Earl of Oxford.

Oxford must have valued Munday highly as none of the other plays selected for Blackfriars was nearly so bad. Blank verse had not yet become the rule for Elizabethan plays though prose was preferred over the old fourteener couplet forms. F&F, however, is a mish-mash of verse forms, most accomplished through word inversions and vague scansion. At least one type of couplet was invented by Munday himself and apparently never employed again after his A banquet of daintie conceits,

Surely, George Chapman — among the finer poets of his or any other time — would have been horrified to discover that he was associated with such abominable poetry, even in his early 20s. Over time, Munday would graduate from an abominable to a mediocre poet. He would write no more plays in any other forms than blank verse and prose.

1 Another appears under the initials S.G. Once thought to have referred to Stephen Gosson, but Gosson was such a bitter enemy of plays that he was never taken seriously as a candidate.

2 Shakespeare Statistics https://www.shak-stat.engsem.uni-hannover.de/

3 Parrott, T. M. “The Authorship of Two Italian Gentlemen.” Modern Philology, Sept. 1915. 65-75.

4 Ilsemann, Hartmut. “Chapman in the Shadows: Computational Attribution and the Case of Fidele and Fortunio

Introduction.”

5 “Supplement prepared by the General Editor. Dec. 1933. W. W. Greg.” issued for insertion in The Malone Society 1919 edition of Fidele and Fortunio Two Italian Gentlemen.

6 Apparently, John's membership and status in the Drapers Guild can only be inferred.

7 The works he published under his numerous pen-names did not, as the rule, include the motto or the declaration.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• Invention in a Noted Weed: the Poetry of William Shakespeare. September 21, 2024. “The coward conquest of a wretches knife,...”

• The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 108. Edward de Vere to his son, Henry. “That may expresse my love, or thy deare merit?”

• Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

• Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.

• 

Shakespeare's Stormy French Reading List: Du Bartas' Tempest and Rabelais'.

In this series:

• Shakespeare and Joshua Sylvester (or Maybe Not).
• The Horses of Shakespeare and Luigi Pulci.
• Du Bartas - Dinosaurs = Shakespeare's Gaunt Speech in Richard the Second.
• A Little Birdie Tells Me: Shakespeare Read Du Bartas in the Original French.
• Shakespeare's Stormy French Reading List: Du Bartas' Tempest and Rabelais'.

Having begun with Du Bartas quotes concerning nightingales and larks [link], we now move on to Du Bartas' tale of the Prophet Jonah in the Third Book of the Fourth Day of the Second of the Divine Weeks. Jonah having fled by ship from the mission he was given by God brings upon the ship and all aboard a mighty tempest.

Du Bartas's original reads:

Calez , dit le patron, calez voile: baissez

Et misane, & beau-pré. Mais les vents courroucez

Deslachent sur sa face une bourasque forte,

Qui son jargonde mer, bou-bourdonnante emporte.

Des hommes esperdus le confus hurlement,¹

["Trim the sails," said the captain, "trim the sails: lower
The mizzen and the bowsprit." But the furious winds
Unleashed a strong squall upon his face,
Which carried away his jargon-filled, roaring speech.
The confused howling of the bewildered men,...]

In Joshua Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas's Weeks, this is rendered:

Strike, strike our saile (the Master cryes) amain,

Vaile misne and sprit-sail: but hee cryes in vain ;

For, in his face the blasts so bluster ay,

That his Sea-gibb'rish is straight born away.

Confused cryes of men dismay'd in minde,²

While it is not always the case, here Sylvester has managed a literal translation.

Shakespeare's Tempest being a play, these general descriptions take on flesh. The Captain gives his orders through the boatswain:

Boteswain. Heigh my hearts, cheerely, cheerely my harts: yare, yare:

Take in the toppe-sale: Tend to th’Masters whistle :

Blow till thou burst thy winde, if roome enough.

*

Botes. Downe with the top-Mast: yare, lower, lower,

A cry within. Enter Sebastian, Anthonio & Gonzalo.

upon this howling: they are lowder then the weather,

or our office: yet againe? What do you heere? Shal we

give ore and drowne, have you a minde to sinke ?

Sebas. A poxe o’your throat, you bawling, blasphemous incharitable Dog.

*

Botes. Lay her a hold, a hold, set her two courses off to Sea againe, lay her off.³

The howling wind does not need to be described. It is being provided by stage machinery. Shakespeare does not repeat or approximate Sylvester's term “ Sea-gibb'rish” but the fact is not sufficient to tell us whether he was working from Du Bartas's original or Sylvester or both or neither.

Now Du Bartas amplifies the storm into an assault by canon.

Comme plusieurs canons braquez contre une tour

Faisans un rang de trous rez-terre tout autour,

Esbranlent bien le mur. Mais le dernier tonnerre

D'un fer aislé de feu le renverse par terre .⁴

[Like several cannons aimed against a tower,
Making a row of holes all around at ground level,
They shake the wall. But the final thunderclap
Of a winged iron projectile of fire knocks it to the ground.,]

Sylvester's translation of the Divine Weekes renders it:

As, many Canons, 'gainst a Castle bent,

Make many holes, and much the rampire rent.

And shake the wall, but yet the latest shock

Of fire-wing'd Bullets batters down the Rock

He takes a number of minor liberties in order to maintain his rhyme-schema.

In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Ariel recounts the storm he has risen to terrify those on the King's ship:

I flam’d amazement, sometime I’ld divide

And burne in many places; on the Top-mast,

The Yards and Bore-spritt, would I flame distinctly,

Then meete, and joyne. Joves Lightning, the precursers

O’th dreadfull Thunder-claps more momentarie

And fight out-running were not;...

The canons needed not be expressly mentioned in the play. The audience is only too aware of them without a word. Instead the flash and crack of them firing blank rounds, and the sulfur smell wafting over the audience is described to heighten the effect:

the fire, and cracks

Of sulphurous roaring, the moil...⁵

It should be noted that Shakespeare specifically mentions the boresprit⁶ (beau-pré⁷, beau / bore) that Sylvester has rendered as “sprit-sail”. Still, it is not nearly enough to clinch our investigation for us.

But those who have read my “The Tempests of Shakespeare and Rabelais” know that Ariel is understood to have described the storm effect called “St. Elmo's Fire”.⁸ The Rabelais, is a much clearer, direct source for Ariel's speech:

les categides, thielles, lelapes, et presteres enflamber tout autour de nous par les psoloentes, urges, elicies, et aultres ejaculations etherees

[the catapults, javelins, thunderbolts, and fiery projectiles ignited everything around us with the whistling sounds, surges, flashes, and other ethereal emanations.]

And Panurge imagines demons rising around the ship in Rabelais' tempest in the direct fashion Ferdinand imagines them in Shakespeare:⁹

Je croy que touts les diables sont deschainez aujourd'huy ¹⁰

[I believe all the devils have got loose today.]

Not in the euphemistic style wielded by Du Bartas:

Le Pilote pendant sur l'escume d'un mont

Pense du Pole auant voir l'enfer plus profond.

Et puis precipité jusqu'à l'areine molle

Du plus bas de l'enfer pense voir le haut pole.

Et sentant l'ennemi & dedans & dehors,

Autant qu'il voit de flots croit voir autant de morts.¹¹

[The pilot, suspended on the foam of a mountain,
Thinks of the Pole before seeing the deeper hell.
And then, plunged to the soft sand,
From the lowest depths of hell, thinks he sees the high pole.
And sensing the enemy both within and without,
For every wave he sees, he believes he sees as many dead.]

Sylvester's translation converts “the dead” into a general observation upon “death” in order to get his rhyme for which reason Shakespeare could not have gotten any idea of devils rising up from Du Bartas through him.

Interestingly, Du Bartas does get one image exactly in the fashion of Rabelais, and even more magically, when he observes that

le sifflement des chables,

Font chantres merueilleux, des concerts effroyables.¹²

[the whistling of the cables,
Create wondrous melodies, terrifying concerts.]

The image is particularly strong evidence that he, like Shakespeare, read Rabelais's tempest (in the original french), and surely all of his great Gargantua et Pantagruel:

commença... le mistral,... siffler à travers nos antennes... et autres éjaculations éthérées¹³

[the mistral began,... to whistle through our rigging... and other ethereal ejaculations]

But, by-and-large, the great popularity of Du Bartas' poem came from the fact that it was perceived as a Biblical epic. The over-sized lust for life of his even more enormously famous predecessor, inasmuch as he borrowed from him, had to be transformed to suit a religious rather than a literary audience.

This to say that both Du Bartas' and Shakespeare's tempests are clearly influenced by Rabelais' Gargantua et Pantagruel. In the original, for there would be no translation into another language until well after both were dead.

Most of the parallels between Du Bartas' and Shakespeare's tempest, as a result, can be attributed to Rabelais'. Some more limited number, however, suggest that Shakespeare had also read Du Bartas in the original. And the evidence does not end there.

1Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste, Seigneur du. Les Peres, ov La Seconde Partie Dv Troisieme Iovr De La Seconde Sepmaine (1591). 17.

2 Sylvester, Joshuah. Bartas: his Devine weekes and works (1605-14) collated by Alexander Grosart in The Complete Works of Joshuah Sylvester (1880). II.248.

3 Shakespeare, William. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. IX. The Tempest. I.i.10-13, 43-4, 57-8.

4 Bartas. 18.

5 Shakespeare, I.ii.231-7.

6 Boresprit] bowsprit. We cannot know Sh.'s original spelling. Tudor spelling was irregular and numerous copyists/typesetters involved before publication.

7 Beau-pré] derivation: beau-proue. Proue = prow, bow

8 Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “The Tempests of Shakespeare and Rabelais.” Virtual Grub Street. August 15, 2021. https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-tempests-of-shakespeare-and-rabelais.html “St. Elmo’s Fire. During fierce storms sailors often saw sparkling lights dance around their masts. This effect, we have come to know, is caused by the air becoming highly ionized from lightning strikes.”

9 Shakespeare, I.ii.247-250. “the Kings sonne Ferdinand

With haire up-staring (then like reeds, not haire)

Was the first man that leapt; cride hell is empty,

And all the Divels are heere.”

10 Rabelais, Francois. Gargantua et Pantagruel, Clouzot ed. (1913). IV.160.

11 Du Bartas, 17.

12 Du Bartas, 17.

13 Rabelais, IV.156.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• Invention in a Noted Weed: the Poetry of William Shakespeare. September 21, 2024. “The coward conquest of a wretches knife,...”

• The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 108. Edward de Vere to his son, Henry. “That may expresse my love, or thy deare merit?”

• Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

• Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.

• 

A Little Birdie Tells Me: Shakespeare Read Du Bartas in the Original French.

In this series:

• Shakespeare and Joshua Sylvester (or Maybe Not).
• The Horses of Shakespeare and Luigi Pulci.
• Du Bartas - Dinosaurs = Shakespeare's Gaunt Speech in Richard the Second.
• A Little Birdie Tells Me: Shakespeare Read Du Bartas in the Original French.
• Shakespeare's Stormy French Reading List: Du Bartas' Tempest and Rabelais'.

Standard Citation: Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “A Little Birdie Tells Me: Shakespeare Read Du Bartas in the Original French.” Virtual Grub Street,  https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2025/12/a-little-birdie-tells-me-shakespeare.html [state date accessed].

We have discovered that Shakespeare's description of Adonis's charger, in the poem Venus and Adonis, was almost certainly drawn from the collective wisdom of the horsemen of the 15^th and 16^th centuries rather than any particular text. That nothing, in particular, in his works can be shown to have been influenced by Joshua Sylvester's translation of Du Bartas Semaines, as was claimed by many traditional scholars in the early 20^th century.

John of Gaunt's speech, in the play Richard the Second, however, was clearly influenced by a swatch from Du Bartas that appeared in a satirical French grammar, called Ortho-epia (1593), written under the name of John Eliot. (And maybe just a smidgen by Sylvester.) So then, Shakespeare knew of the then famous poem by Du Bartas and his work was at least indirectly influenced by it.

Eliot, it bears mentioning, has no surviving biography. A student of that very common name is discovered to have matriculated to Oxford in 1580. This is the sole evidence by which he is said to have attended university. It is estimated that, if he had enrolled at 18 years of age, he must have been born in 1562, and, as a result, this is given as his birth date in encyclopedia entries.

The rest of his biography has been created for him out of his own works all of which were translations from the French published between 1591 and 1593. Not a trace of him remains after 1593 which encyclopedia entries offer for the date of his demise. Gabriel Harvey mentions him, in his book Pierce's Supererogation, published that same year, but not by name.

Over the past 150 years or so, a very strange fact has been established about Eliot. For some seemingly inexplicable reason, Shakespeare incorporated in his plays more than a little bit from Eliot's translations.

I have already had the pleasure of revealing the man behind the name. There is much more to come on the subject. But now is not the time.

What all of this doesn't answer is: “Did Shakespeare read Du Bartas in the original French?” Could he read literary French?

A reader might be confident that Du Bartas's

Le Monde est un theatre, où de Dieu la puissance,

La justice, l'Amour, le Savoir la Prudence,

Jouet leurs personnages¹

is the model for a famous image from the play As You Like It:

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

But there would have been an available crib for Shakespeare, if he needed it, in the translation by Sylvester (notwithstanding the fact that neither Du Bartas's original nor Sylvester's translation did the Ronsard justice). Shakespeare could have been referencing Sylvester, not Du Bartas.

The world's a stage where God's omnipotence ,

His justice, knowledge, love, and providence

Do act the parts.²

But Shakespeare didn't need Sylvester, because both he and Du Bartas were referencing the French poet Pierre Ronsard:

Le Monde est le theatre, et les hommes acteurs;
La Fortune, qui est maistresse de la Sceine,
Appreste les habits, et de la vie humaine
Les Cieux et les Destins en sont les spectateurs.³

[The world is the stage, and men the actors;
Fortune, who is mistress of the play,
Prepares the costumes, and the human lives
The Heavens and the Destinies look down upon.]

The passage in Ronsard is a much more exact match for As You Like It. In fact, the passage in the play qualifies as translation.

As it turns out, a little birdie tells us the answer to our question. In Shakespeare's Winters Tale, “The Larke, that tirra-Lyra chaunts,”⁴ sings the identical song that it sings in the fifth day of Du Bartas La Semaine, in which the lark (alouette) and the nightingale (rossignol) are compared:

La gentille Alouete avec son tire-lire

Tire l'ire à l'iré tirelirant tire

Vers la voute du ciel: puis son vol vers ce lieu

Vire, & desire dire adieu Dieu, adieu Dieu.⁵

[The gentle Lark with her tire-lire
Tire l'ire à l'iré tirelirant draws
Towards the vault of the heavens: then turns her flight toward
The place, & her way to say to god God, to god God.]

Eliot chose “Tee-ree-lee-ree” for the song; Sylvester “Heer peer-l neer”. Shakespeare's onomatopoeia exactly matches Du Bartas's: “ tirra-Lyra”.

But Eliot's Ortho-epia is bi-lingual. With a bit of mental dexterity Shakespeare could pick out Du Bartas's lark song regardless that Eliot had modified it in the English translation.

But Du Bartas had made a mistake. He didn't know his birds as well as he thought. In the extended passage, the nightingales sang at daybreak (point du jour). Around 1587 he corrected his mistake, in a translation of his own, of the Scottish King James VI's poem Lepanto, and the translation was published in 1591.

In it, the lark finds its way into the conversation somehow. Its song a break in the midst of cruel war. The nightingale is nowhere to be found. (Perhaps because he prefers privacy.) The lark, instead, is properly the harbinger of the new day.

Aussi tost que l'aurore

Peinte d'or, de safran, de vermeillon encore

A banni la nuict ſombre, & qu'en tire-lirant

L'Alouëtte a donné d'un bec doux-souspirant

Un gai bon jour au jour,...⁶

[ As soon as the dawn
Painting with gold, saffron, and vermilion again
Banishes somber night, with tire-lirant,
The Lark, gives from a sweet-sighing beak,
A gay good day to the day,...]

Add to our results, then, the following exchange between Romeo and Juliet about the lark and the nightingale:

Juliet. Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day:
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear;
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree:
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.

Romeo. It was the lark, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east:⁷
Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day⁸
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.

Still, Romeo cannot choose to leave if Juliet wishes it to be the nightingale and not yet day:

Romeo. Nor that is not the lark, whose notes do beat
The vaulty heaven⁹ so high above our heads:

Juliet recalls that Lark's song is said to sweetly divide day from night:

Juliet. Some say the lark makes sweet division.¹⁰  

But now the song is not sweet for it divides she and Romeo.

Actually, this is only the beginning of the images Shakespeare borrowed from Du Bartas in the original French. But it will have to suffice for the present.

1Du Bartas. La Sepmaine (1579). 4-5.

2Sylvester, Joshua. The First Day of the First Week. ll.180-2.

3Ronsard, Pierre. Oeuvres ed. Blanchemain (1860), iv, 184

4The Winter's Tale, IV.iii.11-2.

5 Du Bartas Premiere Semaine (1585), V, 615ff

6 Du Bartas. Les Peres (1591). 79.

7 Painting with gold, saffron, and vermilion [Peinte d'or, de safran, de vermeillon]

8 A gay good day [Un gai bon jour]

9 the vault of the heavens [la voute du ciel]

10 The Lark, gives from a sweet-sighing beak, / A gay good day to the day, [L'Alouëtte a donné d'un bec doux-souspirant / Un gai bon jour au jour,...]

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• Invention in a Noted Weed: the Poetry of William Shakespeare. September 21, 2024. “The coward conquest of a wretches knife,...”

• The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 108. Edward de Vere to his son, Henry. “That may expresse my love, or thy deare merit?”

• Sonnet 130: Shakespeare's Reply to a 1580 Poem by Thomas Watson. September 7, 2024. “Interesting to see our Derek Hunter debating with Dennis McCarthy, at the North group,...”.
• Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”

• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.

• Check out the V.G.S. Oxfordian Shakespeare Poetry Page for many poems by Shakespeare together with historical context.

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