 |
| Francis Bacon |
·
Elizabethan plays weren’t thought of
as literature until after 1600.
·
The title page of most plays during
the 1590s didn’t name an author.
·
Some playwrights were never named on
a title page while they were alive.
·
In the case of John Lyly, some of
his plays were published over a dozen years until his name appeared on a title
page in 1597.
These he finds unconvincing. The author’s name having appeared in a number
of title pages after 1598, he continues, “it would seem foolish for publishers
not to attach the Shakespeare brand to his previously unattributed plays—unless
they had other reasons not to do so.”
Among the other things that
occurred in 1598, it is worth noting, that in September, Francis Mere’s Palladis
Tamia was entered in the Stationers registers for publication. It was published in the same year. Meres gave the first description of the plays
of William Shakespeare. I quote from my Edward de Vere was Shakespeare: at long last the proof:
250. But, as with so much in Edward De Vere’s
life, Meres’ praise had a worrisome side.
He mentions Shake-speare’s plays by name:
As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy
among the Latines: so Shakespeare, among the English is the most excellent in
both kinds for the stage; for Comedy, witnes his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors,
his Love labours lost, his Love labours wonne, his Midsummers night dreame, & his Merchant of Venice: for Tragedy, his Richard the 2. Richard the 3. Henry the 4.
King Iohn, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo
and Juliet.
Shake-speare the poet was now Shake-speare writer for the common
stage. Those who knew he was The Bard,
but only knew him as the poet, now knew that he was the person who had written
the plays, many of which indeed border on libel in certain scenes.[2]
Earlier, in the introduction, I had pointed out the following
regarding the same topic:
xx. That same year, quartos of popular plays
began to appear with Shake-speare listed on the title page as author.[3]
The titles of those quartos show an unmistakable pattern.
Almost exactly a year before, Edward de Vere’s daughter, Elizabeth,
the Countess of Derby, had furiously been cast out of the house by her
husband. He had received letters
informing him that she had had an affair with the Earl of Essex. Matters looked very bad for her. The Earl of Derby only relented so far as to
allow her to escape from his fury because certain of the servants dedicated to
her had managed to convince him that the rumors might have been wrong however
trusted the source.
In the book I advance the theory that the mysterious missing Shakespeare
play Love’s Labours Won was rewritten by Edward in order to support the
effort to save his daughter’s reputation and marriage. The play would be presented at Court in
February of 1598 (New Style).[4] Thenceforward it would be known as Much
Adoe About Nothing. The change would
have occurred too soon before Meres’ book went to press for him to become aware
of it.
If we look at the list of Shakespeare plays mentioned by Mere’s we
find the following:
Gentlemen of Verona
Errors
Love Labors Lost
Love Labors Wonne
Midsummers Night Dream
Merchant of Venice
Richard the 2
Richard the 3
Henry the 4,
King John
Titus Andronicus
Romeo and Juliet
If we list the plays published in quarto, with Shakespeare's name on the title page, between 1598 and the
pirated version of Hamlet, in 1603, we find all but one had been titles named
by Meres:
Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598)
Richard III (1598)
Richard II (1598)
Henry IV, Part 1 (1599)
Henry IV, Part 2 (1600)
The Merchant of Venice (1600)
Much Ado About Nothing (1600) (the new name of Love’s Labours Won)
Merry Wives of Windsor (1602)
As for the Richard plays, they were merely recently
published anonymous plays for which the galleys had remained intact. A tiny change to the title page and they were re-released as new editions of the plays by the now famous playwright William
Shakespeare featured in Francis Meres’ popular Palladis Tamia. As for the Merry Wives, it could only
have been a matter of time before publishers began teasing the names of the
authors of various works out of those who were in the know.
Shakespeare’s name and some others must have improved sales. There had to have been printer’s agents
looking for the names of authors to put on previously anonymous plays. Predictably, they would have been a pretty
hit-or-miss crew and their employers not too particular about whether the name
on the title page was correct.
Shakespeare’s name next appeared on the title pages of the The London
Prodigal (1605), King Lear (1608), The Yorkshire Tragedy
(1608), and Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1609).
There is no sign that Shakespeare himself joined in the new trend by providing the names of the plays he had written to date. Nor by declaring himself the author of Troilus
and Cressida (1609). Of course,
Edward de Vere was dead at the time. The
Epistle-Preface even says as much (as I have explained in my Ulysses and
Agamemnon (1584)[5]). It also gives us a strong hint that Susan de
Vere and the Herbert brothers may have been the “grand possessors” of the only manuscript
of the play at the time:
thanke fortune for the scape it hath
made amongst you. Since by the grand possessors wills I beleeue you should haue
prayd for them rather then beene prayd.[6]
[1] Agemo,
Richard. “From No Name to Shakespeare .
. . or Not.” http://richardagemo.com/from-no-name-to-shakespeare-or-not/. Last accessed 11/20/2018.
[2] Edward
de Vere was Shakespeare: at long last the proof, 250.
[3]
Ibid., xx.
[4] Ibid.,
245. “According to the 19th century
scholar, Frederick Fleay, the records of the Court Revels show Shake-speare’s Love’s
Labours Lost was played at Whitehall over the Christmas holidays. He feels it is likely that Shake-speare’s Love’s
Labour Won, rewritten to be the play we now know as Much Adoe About
Nothing, played for the first time in the next February (1598, new
style). Considering the many minor
errors in the revels records, it is by no means impossible that Much Adoe
played, rewritten but still under its earlier name, during the holidays.”
[5] The
Early Plays of Shakespeare: Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584), 6114. ‘The prologue
speaks of “the grand possessors wills” who Steevens interprets as “Heming and
Condell”. It seems that the Herbert brothers (Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery)
and, Edward de Vere’s daughter, the Countess of Montgomery might better fit the
description.’
[6] Shakespeare's
Troilus And Cressida: The First Quarto, 1609. A Facsimile in Photo –
Lithography by William Griggs, 2.
- The Nymphs of Doctor Foreman’s Macbeth. October 21, 2018. “How did Foreman make the mistake of describing them precisely as Holinshed? But differently from the text we have of Macbeth? To consider Foreman’s account a simple mistake would require an astronomically improbable coincidence.”
- The Battle Over Shakespeare's Early and Late Plays. September 24, 2018. “The answers to the post-Oxford dilemma, of course, are three.”
- Edward de Vere Changes the Course of History: Christmas, 1580. September 17, 2018. “First Secretary to the Queen, Sir Francis Walsingham, had been pressing the Queen since at least the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, in France, in 1573, to recognize that Catholicism was, by its nature, unalterably inimical to her person and her throne.”
- 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."
- Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
No comments:
Post a Comment