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Tuesday, March 10, 2026

The Shakespeare Biography and How it Grew.

As Shakespeare became the most famous name in English literature, following the actor David Garrick's famous Shakespeare Jubilee, in 1769, the public wanted to know more about his biography. Very little information was available, but, like so many suddenly lucrative industries, the huge demand resulted in experts and products to meet the demand. Humble household items were discovered which family members confirmed had been used by the man. Anecdotes from his life began to appear.

Actually, even 100 years before the Jubilee, Shakespeare's work had begun growing more popular. The puritans had shut down the theaters for some 18 years before the restoration of the English monarchy, in 1664, in the person of King Charles II. With the Restoration, the theaters opened once again much to the pleasure of the utterly bored English public. But, at first, there were few playwrights left to supply the demand. To fill out the theater schedules old plays were brought back on stage.

By then Shakespeare's plays were particularly old. They were considered to have great potential but to require considerable revision in order to meet the standards of the time. Rewritten, they were indeed highly popular. But no one knew anything of his life. He was a blank waiting to be filled in. The stories began to flow.

Antiquarians kept eye and ear open for new information concerning him. Scouts made modest amounts of money seeking out information to sell to them. Old men provided stories of having met the man. Old retired actors were especially attractive sources and suddenly found themselves a center of attention again. As time passed, sons recounted stories they were sure they remembered their fathers had told them their grandfathers had told about the man.

In short order, thick biographies began to appear, based upon a small number of surviving business and legal records and these stories from actors' tales and sons of sons of sons. These coming to quite little, however, the primary source of biography was his plays. His poems, at first, seemed problematical to the experts, and were left to quietly molder, but, after the Jubilee, the demand for new information was so great that they too were eventually culled for information. The popularity of these biographies made their authors quite famous, in their own right, and served admirably to pay household and seaside vacation expenses.

For all of this, during the years 1578-1585 — the years a young Tudor commoner must be learning a trade — there existed no detail at all. It was in 1790 that the dominant scholar in the Shakespeare Industry at the time, Edmund Malone, “supposed that he might have been a clerk in an attorney's office, thus killing two birds with one stone, and accounting not only for the barren seven years, but for the legal expressions to be found in his works.”1

For another 100 years, Shakespeare scholarship would make its discoveries after this fashion. Scholars would bid to fill each troublesome void with the most promising conjecture that satisfied the requirement that the Stratford man be unquestionably the author of the works. The one fact that was unquestionable, after all, was that the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays declared the Stratford man was their author.

 

So then, Shakespeare had been a law clerk. Well, after he'd been a country schoolmaster, anyway, boning up to teach little tousle-headed monsters Latin. Soon he would be in London valet-parking the horses of wealthy theater-goers and writing Romeo and Juliet at night by romantic candle-light.

Fellow Elizabethan playwright, Christopher Marlowe, on the other hand, also left behind only very limited biographical material. He was also a great writer. But not a single thick biography was being written on his life. His plays were fewer, his grasp of human-nature neither as profound nor as various. Had there been a Jubilee for him it would have begun and ended at that.

Ironically, for these reasons no industry grew up around his works. His scholars could hope for only normal rewards, a normally cloistered academic life. If they invented the slightest thing they would eventually be chastised by their fellows and lose even that much.

Shakespeare scholars, on the other hand, had struck the mother load. Anything they published, so long as it adhered strictly to the Stratford man, and portrayed him as the paragon of all that was admirable in human nature, it hardly mattered what or how much they wrote. If their work was discovered to be contradictory it only required a conjecture or two more to patch matters up. It just meant more words for each of which they received an additional penny or two and the prospect of invitations to speak at the finest universities and ladies auxiliaries.

The situation being as it was it is truly surprising just how much exceptional Shakespeare scholarship was done during the 19th century. While the biographies were abysmally bad and the fraudulent “discoveries” mislead scholars to this day, a dozen or two of names, imperfect though they were, in their own right, were absolutely rigorous about their work. Their efforts have left us an impressive collective work product.

As for the others, it could only be a matter of time before the Shakespeare biography grew so ridiculous that even the general public challenged it. The Industry itself, of course, stood unflinchingly behind the biography. Nevertheless, it lost a large chunk of its market-share to the Bacon Industry.

The problem was that there was no legitimate evidence — except for the letters in the front material of the First Folio — that there was the least connection between the texts of the plays and the life of the Stratford man who lay beneath the floor of Trinity Church, Stratford, in a grave featuring a bit of doggerel verse and a placard above in Latin. The plays that provided most of the playwright's biography were, in fact, seriously at odds with the documented facts of the Stratford man's life.

Fate rarely being kind, a few dissenting voices over the centuries could not begin to turn the momentum of the Shakespeare Industry. Only a famous alternative candidate as author of the plays might manage the feat. Sir Francis Bacon's name was offered. It was a documented fact that he was formally educated in the classics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and law at Gray's Inn where Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors had later been played. His name featured prominently in a manuscript that showed signs of once having contained Shakespeare manuscripts.

Bacon, it was said, hid behind a front man in order to avoid the damage his reputation would suffer from being associated with the immorality of the theater world. While all these factors argued in his behalf, Bacon's life was well and heavily documented and far more from the documents argued against his authorship than for it. Baconians resorted to “discoveries” of codes and ciphers in the Shakespeare text in order to bring the biographies into line.

In the midst of all of this, traditional scholars found themselves having to take up defensive positions on various topics. Shakespeare identified with the noble and ruling classes in his plays, it was determined, because his genius gave him a sense of natural nobility. His plays had French, Italian and Latin sources because he was provided cribs of the original texts from the likes of Ben Jonson and John Florio and because there must have been available English translations records of which have not survived to our day. Shakespeare knew surprising amounts about Italy and the law through tavern conversations with sailors and lawyers.

Bacon's candidacy became untenable for the simple reason that he was not the author. But, still, the wide-ranging inconsistencies of the Stratford biography remained and the authorship question they provoked. The vague and conveniently untestable replies developed by the Industry scholars also remain — bolstered by pop-psychology diagnoses of mental degeneracy in those who express doubt.


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Tuesday, February 24, 2026

How Shakespeare and Ariosto Go Back to the 1570s.

One of the less well-known effects of the invention of the movable type printing press, by Johannes Gutenberg, in Strasbourg, Germany, circa 1440, is that it allowed the birth of renaissance theater, in Ferrara, Italy, to rapidly become known throughout Europe. For a brief time little Ferrara was the center of the literary world — both poetry and theater. But this was only recognized when the works of the various authors began to be published in the early 1500s, in Venice.

At the very end of the 15th century, and very beginning of the 16th, Ercole I de Este, Duke of Ferrara, managed to steer clear of most of the war between the Papal coalition and France. Peaceful and well-defended, the city's studiolo1 grew to become an intellectual nexus.

Ercole's son, Alfonso I, kept Ferrara free, through his fine military mind and diplomacy, and marriage to Lucretia Borgia, until the resolution of the war, in 1529. While he did, the studiolo continued to flourish. Under Ercole, it gave the renaissance the works of Matteo Maria Boiardo, Niccolò da Correggio and Ludovico Ariosto. In what momentum remained, under Alfonso, the world received further works of Ariosto and the works of his students Giovanni Battista Giraldi (pen name Cinthio) and Ercole Bentivoglio, and of the frequent visitor Fra Matteo Bandello.

Most of these names are known among English readers — inasmuch as they are known at all — as favorite authors and influences on the works of Shakespeare — especially Ariosto. The first great work of theater, we are reminded, by Edmund G. Gardner, occurred in the reign of Ercole:

We may take January 25, 1486, as the birthday of the modern Italian drama.2

But looked at more closely, this was the birthday of the modern theater in France and England though they did not quite know it yet. Had there been no printing press they would not likely have known about it until much later.

The play that was shown that day was Ariosto's translation of the Menaechmi of Plautus. It was an enormous success.

By 1573, the London literati already were half a decade into their own renaissance. In that year, a highly personable poet, playwright and aspiring courtier, named George Gascoigne, published his translation of another of Ariosto's plays entitled, The Supposes3, together with the rest of his works to date. As was often the case in those days, he ingratiated himself with a number of other authors by offering to include selections from their work as well in an anthology at the end of his own. The whole was entitled An Hundreth Sundrie Flowres.

Foremost among the “toward young gentlemen,” declared the editors, was one who went under the moniker “Si fortunatus infoelix” a.k.a. “Master F.I.” (for a gentleman did not seek publicity), had also translated some lines of poetry from Ariosto. Those lines were the first eight stanzas of the 31st Canto of far-and-away Ariosto's most famous work, Orlando Furioso.

WHat state to man, so sweets and pleasaunt weave.

As to be tyed, in linkes of worthy love ?

What life so blist and happie might appeare,

As for to serve Cupid that God above ?

If that our mindes were not sometimes infect,

With dread, with feare, with care, with cold suspect:

With deepe dispaire, with furious frenesie,

Handmaides to her, whome we call jelosie.


For ev'ry other sop of sower chaunce,

Which lovers tast amid their sweete delight:

Encreaseth joye, and doth their love advaunce,

In pleasures place, to have more perfect plight.

The thirstie mouth thinkes water hath good taste,

The hungrie jawes, are pleas'd, with eche repaste:

Who hath not prov'd what dearth by warres doth growe,

Cannot of peace the pleasaunt plenties knowe.


And though with eye, we see not ev'ry joye,

Yet mate the minde, full well support the same,

[An] absent life long led in great annoye

(When presence comes) doth turne from griefe to game,

To serve without reward is thought great paine,

But if dispaire do not therewith remaine,

It may be borne for right rewardes at last,

Followe true service, though they come not fast.

Disdaines, repulses, finallie eche ill,

Eche smart, eche paine, of love eche bitter tast,

To thinke on them gan frame the lovers will,

To like eche joye, the more that comes at last:

But this infernall plague if once it tutch,

Or venome once the lovers mind with grutch,

All festes and joyes that afterwardes befall,

The lover comptes them light or nought at all.


This is that sore, this is that poisoned wound,

The which to heale, nor salve, nor ointmentes serve,

Nor charme of wordes, nor Image can be founde,

Nor observaunce of starres can it preserve,

Nor all the art of Magicke can prevaile,

Which Zoroacles found for our availe,

Oh cruell plague, above all sorrowes smart,

With desperate death thou sleast the lovers heart.


And me even now, thy gall hath so enfect,

As all the joyes which ever lover found,

And all good haps, that ever Troylus sect,

Atchieved yet above the luckles ground:

Can never sweeten once my mouth with mell,

Nor bring my thoughtes, againe in rest to dwell.

Of thy mad moodes, and of naught else I thinke,

In such like seas, faire Bradamant did sincke.4

Those who have read my Shakespeare in 15735 know that I have identified Si fortunatus infoelix as a young Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. In the Flowres we have from him a number of what are now called “Shakespearean sonnets,” on the model introduced, during the reign of Henry VIII, by Vere's uncle, Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey. In the translation, here, Vere finds a creative way to include Shakespeare's favorite joy-annoy rhyme-pair.

Some two years later, Vere chose to travel to Italy, long a desire of his. A year later, still, on January 1, 1576, records show that a play was shown at Queen Elizabeth's court recorded by a clerk of the Revels Office as The historie of Error.6 The similarity of this entry to the title of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors has caused many scholars to suggest that the play might have been an earlier version of the Shakespeare play. The Shakespeare is set, not in Italy, from which Vere had yet to return, but in Greece. Because the Stratford man would only have been 12 years old at the time, it has often been asserted that he may have taken the 1576 play and rewritten it making it his own.

The play as we have it is based in part upon the Menaechmi of Plautus. Much of it is widely understood to have been written well before the 1590s — probably no later than the early 1580s. The many passages written in fourteeners and Poulter's Measure would have been outdated by that time. There are indications that many more passages, still, were in the earlier measures and later restructured as prose and iambic pentameter.

The printing press had not only informed English literati that the Renaissance theater had been born but it created a printed literature of their own. Each playwright could observe the most recent developments at the theaters and in print. This created a cycle in which each learned the new popular traits — many culled from books imported from European booksellers — and incorporated them in their own plays which were in turn the source for the next round.

The development of the theater went from fast to faster. Did Shakespeare take most of his plays from earlier authors and merely rewrite them as his own? Or did he write the original plays and revise them — update them — to keep them popular as tastes rapidly changed? In such plays as Comedy of Errors, Henry V, Hamlet7, Troilus and Cressida8, and others, I think the evidence weighs heavily toward the latter option. Those who begin their assessment with an absolute requirement that the Stratford man be the playwright, of course, think otherwise.


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


1  Pardi, Giuseppe. Lo Studio di Ferrara (1903). 22. Per tali fortunate condizioni Ferrara doveva sembrare una tra le città d' Italia più adatte per l'istituzione di uno Studio, che promettesse di riuscire fiorente.”

2  Gardner, Edmund G. The King of Court Poets: A Study of the Work, Life and Times of Lodovico Ariosto (1906).

3  In Italian, I Suppositi.

4  The Complete Works of George Gascoigne (Cunliffe ed.) 1907. 424-6.

5  Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Shakespeare in 1573: Apprenticeship and Scandal (2021) (https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-1573-Apprenticeship-Authorship-Progress-ebook/dp/B096GSQV14)

6  Steele, Mary Susan. Plays and Masques at Court During the Reigns of Elizabeth, James and Charles (no date). 61.

7  See my Back When Ophelia Jumped Off a Cliff: the Hamlet of 1589 (2022) for much more. (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09WC94FGW/)

8  See my Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584) (2018) for much more. (https://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-Agamemnon-Edward-William-Shakespeare-ebook/dp/B07JD7KM1T/)


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Monday, February 09, 2026

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

In this series:

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 16th 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 16th and the first half of the 17th 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 16th 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 17th 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.


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Friday, January 16, 2026

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 16th 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 2nd 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.

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.

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