The Great Waugh-Bate Debate #1: Steven Steinburg’s Rebuttal and Alexander Waugh’s Encrypted Polimanteia.

I am delighted to see Steven Steinburg’s “The ‘Post-Truth World’ of Sir Jonathan Bate” [link], an extended evaluation of Jonathan Bate’s half of the recent Waugh-Bate authorship debate.  For better or worse, Mr. Steinburg is clear from the first that he has neither the intention of evaluating the performance of both participants nor approving of anything Mr. Bates said for his part.  This evaluation is intended for the faithful.

Fair enough.  My own plans include constructive, respectful criticism of both participants.  I suggest that the Oxfordian movement would be particularly well served to be challenged on those methods or findings which make us vulnerable to caricature.  That said, I admit that the long habit of ridicule has become fixed among Stratfordians and the public that chooses to believe in them.  Like all habits, it has become so emotionally satisfying that it no longer discriminates as  to proper objects.

If there is any hope of gaining an amount of respect it will only come with time and only then with the willingness to adopt a general scholarly discipline that, to be entirely truthful, does not seem at all likely.  This is not to say we don’t have our moments.  Mr. Bate was not particularly rigorous at any number of points during his presentation and Steinburg nicely catches him out.  Bate’s asserts that:

Look at the countryman in The Winter’s Tale speaking about tods equaling pounds and shillings for wool. This is countryman’s language.

Steinburg’s answer is brief and definitive:

A nobleman concerned with the wool trade would have known what ‘tods’ were. Wool trading was one of the preferments requested by (but not granted to), Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.

For that moment, no attempt is made to be witty at the opponent’s expense.  None to freight the answer with some favorite Oxfordian speculation.  The answer is based upon documentary evidence that can be cited or looked up in short order.

While there are other answers somewhat as strong our champion is just a smidge discursive.  Correct points are made even if they are not particularly close to the center of the target.  Instead of a "very palpable hit" the swordsman settles with inflicting a rash of nicks.  I have tried my own hand at Bate’s Capulet-and-his-kitchen servants and Elsinor comments in the first installment of my “Bystander” column [link].  The format forces me to keep the critique off-the-cuff but sometimes there is something to be said  for that.

As much as I am delighted to see rational answers to Bate’s assertions, however, and hopeful that it will help build momentum toward a trend, Steinburg cannot help but dally around the potential for conspiracy in the interlineated gifts to Hemmings, Condell, and Burbage, in Shaksper of Stratford’s Will.  Bate’s comments do not put an end to it, his critic wishes to make clear.  Even a bit of irritated quibbling is engaged in.  While I don’t expect Mr. Steinburg to have read my “Shaksper’s Second Best Bed: the (almost) final chapter” [link], if he is going to imply conspiratorial possibilities it is his responsibility to do that necessary research.

Nor can he resist claiming in a footnote riposte that the plays of John Lyly were actually written by Edward De Vere.  This is among the most common bad habits of the Oxfordian community.  The fact that De Vere can be shown to have likely written works under three or four pen names unleashes the faithful to claim half the literature of the time for his pen. 

There is as of yet no sufficient basis to assign the writings attributed on contemporary title pages to writers living at the time to the secret pen of De Vere.  John Lyly wrote the plays attributed to him on the quarto title pages.  He may or may not have written the songs that were left blank (with the exception of the later play, Mother Bombie) in the original quartos.  He may or may not have contributed some lines or even a scene in one or another of the plays.  But while Shakespeare was much influenced by the euphuism of Lyly, and by his plays, he chose not to incorporate most of its traits into his own work.  There are clear and substantial differences.

I have suggested, in my Edward de Vere was Shakespeare: at long last the proof  [link], that De Vere did write the play Agamemnon and Ulysses, directed by Lyly, in 1584, but never published.  Shakespeare’s play Troilus and Cressida is actually half about Ulysses’ appeals to Agamemnon to put Achilles in his proper place.  The theme, as it appears in Troilus, is precisely in line with Oxford’s complaints against Leicester from an interrogatory he gave shortly before the date of the earlier play.

Unfortunately, our champion, Alexander Waugh, started his presentation, in part, on a still worse foot when he repeated a favorite claim of a hidden message in the marginal text of William Covell’s Polimanteia.  The reference beside it to Oxford was to the university. There is nothing to suggest freighting it with a cipher identifying the Earl.  Shakespeare appeared in the margin because Covell had no idea who he was, beyond being a popular poet, therefore could not assign him, in the main text, as an ornament of either Cambridge or Oxford. There is nothing that requires the coincident location of “Shakespeare” in the margin, beside “Oxford” and “courte-dear-verse” in the main text to be an “encrypted allusion” to “Oxford… our De Vere,” except for Mr. Waugh’s exasperated tone when he speaks of resistance to it.

The only fact that is clear is that the reference is to the highly valued courtier poet Samuel Daniel, ornament of Oxford University, his alma mater, as is stated outright.  That there might be encryption lacks any confirming evidence.

Waugh’s claim does attract attention in a way that documented fact does not.  There is something to be said for that.  In the long run, however, such claims can easily be cited as evidence that the Oxfordian position is not serious.

All of this said, I felt that Alexander Waugh started off slowly but continually grew stronger as the debate proceeded.  He did well.  Jonathan Bate, on the other hand, is a much more effective public speaker.  For all of his many errors, he probably appeared to the general public to be the more knowledgeable party.  But, then, post-debate spin tends to be more important than the debate itself.

• Let the sky rain potatoes! December 16, 2017. "In fact, the sweet potato had only just begun to be a delicacy within the reach of splurging poets and playwrights and members of the middle classes at the time that The Merry Wives of Windsor (the play from which Falstaff is quoted) was written.  The old soldier liked to keep abreast of the new fads."
• Leonard Digges and the Shakespeare First Folio.  November 30, 2017.  "Upon receiving his baccalaureate, in 1606, Leonard briefly chose to reside in London. After that he went on an extended tour of the Continent which ended around the year that Shaksper died."
• Did Falstaff Write a Poem for Lowe’s Chyrirgerie?  December 2, 2017. "Can honour set-to a leg? no: or an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is honour? a word. What is that word, honour? air."

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