Plutarch, Petrarch and a Shakespeare Authorship Freudian Slip.

In my Edward de Vere was Shakespeare: at long last the proof (2013, 2017) I quoted from Joseph Hall’s Three Last Bookes of Byting Satires (1597).

Sith Pontian left his barren wife at home,

And spent two years at Venice and at Rome,

Returned, hears his blessing ask’d of three,

Cries out, O Julian law! Adultery!

Tho Labeo reaches right (who can deny?)

The true strains of heroic poesy;

For he can tell how fury reft his sense,

And Phoebus fill’d him with intelligence. 

He can implore the heathen deities

To guide his bold and busy enterprise;

Or filch whole pages at a clap for need

From honest Petrarch clad in English weed:

While big but oh's! each stanza can begin,

Whose trunk and tail sluttish and heartless been.[1]

Hall satirizes Edward de Vere under the name “Labeo” who he later continues to describe as a latter day “Ponticus,” the ignoble nobleman subject of Juvenal’s eighth satire.

Among my disappointments with this otherwise stunningly correct description of Vere, is the line “From honest Petrarch clad in English weed”.

Or filch whole pages at a clap for need

From honest Petrarch clad in English weed:

Surely it is clear that Hall wrote “Plutarch,” and the printer introduced the far less likely name Petrarch, so closely related that the typo was missed when the page was proofed.

It bears mentioning that, while influences from Petrarch can be traced in Shake-speare’s works, the line above is almost certainly a misprint that survived the middling proof-reading of the times.  The lines almost certainly should read: “Or filch whole pages at a clap for need / From honest Plutarch clad in English weed”.[2]

To assert that virtual certainty, however, into the midst of a decades long partisan spit-fight is worse than useless. To Stratfordian scholars Labeo/Ponticus only coincidentally resembles Vere, no matter the prohibitive odds of such a close match, and asserting a typo is no more than a lame attempt to build up a false case.

Imagine my demented laughter, then, when, in my just released Shakespeare in 1573: Apprenticeship and Scandal I explained the source of the saying “using one nail to drive out another,” common among poets circa 1573 and Shakespeare, I wrote:

The original of this adage is in Petrarch but the young poets would more likely have learned it from Erasmus’s Latin translation “Clavam clavo pellere”.[3]

The original was, not Petrarch,  but Plutarch. Fortune yet again horrifyingly perverse, I had invented the Shakespeare Authorship Freudian slip.

I have corrected this erratum and uploaded the text again. Unfortunately, Kindle is certain not to issue an updated text for such a small change. I hope that this will highlight the item for those who have purchased copies thus far.  This will have to suffice until there is sufficient reason for Kindle to issue an update.  

As for Juvenal’s eighth satire, and what specifically it informs us Hall felt about the Earl of Oxford, I present the following selections in William Gifford’s excellent English translation.

“Your ancient house!" no more.—I cannot see

The wondrous merits of a pedigree;

No, Ponticus;—nor of a proud display

Of smoaky ancestors, in wax or clay

                    *

What boots it, on the lineal tree to trace,

Through many a branch, the founders of our race,

Time-honoured chiefs; if, in their sight, we give

A loose to vice, and like low villains live?

                    *

Fond man! though all the heroes of your line

Bedeck your halls, and round your galleries shine,

In wax or stone; yet, take this truth from me,

Virtue alone is true nobility.

Gifford was familiar with Hall’s imitation. He gives the following additional notes:

Ver. 89. Say, of dumb animals, &c] Hall, who has imitated some parts of this Satire very closely, though not in his best manner, has been rather successful here:

Tell me, thou gentle Trojan, dost thou prize

Thy brute beasts' worth by their dams' qualities ?

Say'st thou this colt shall prove a swift-paced steed,

Only because a Jennet did him breed ?—

The whiles thou see'st some of thy stallion race,

Their eyes bor'd out, masking the miller's maze,

Like to a Scythian slave sworne to the payle,

Or dragging frothy barrels at their tayle?"

and:

Ver. 105. That Rome may, therefore, thee, not thine admire, &c] Hall again,

And were thy fathers gentle? that's their praise;

No thank to thee, by whom their name decays;

By virtue got they it, and valorous deed,

Do thou so, Pontice, and be honoured.

These are fine lines, but they are much surpassed in beauty by the following, with which I shall, for the present, conclude my extracts from this admirable writer:

Brag of thy father's faults, they are thine own,

Brag of his lands, if they are not foregone;

Brag of thine own good deeds; for they are thine,

More than his life, or lands, or golden line."

               Lib. IV. Sat. iii.

Surely the line “Brag of his lands, if they are not foregone” was meant to sting.

 

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[1] Warton, Thomas. Satires. By Joseph Hall (1824). Bk. vi. Sat. i. 159.

[2] Purdy, Gilbert. Edward de Vere was Shakespeare. 241. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1543136257/

[3] Purdy, Gilbert. Shakespeare in 1573. 51, n.35. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B096GSQV14

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• The Thomas North Theory Springs Leaks Under Scrutiny. June 6, 2021. ‘In McCarthy’s video “How We Know Sir Thomas North Wrote Richard II,” at 1:10, we are informed that “there is zero doubt that this was the passage used.”’
• A 1572 Oxford Letter and the Player’s Speech in Hamlet. August 11, 2020. “The player’s speech has been a source of consternation among Shakespeare scholars for above 200 years.  Why was Aeneas’ tale chosen as the subject?”
• King’s Place: home of the Earl and Countess of Oxford, 1596-1604. November 10, 2020. “In 1596, Elizabeth Trentham received King’s Place, in Hackney, from the estate of one Sir Rowland Hayward. She and her husband, Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, moved in shortly afterward.”
• Shakespeare’s Funeral Meats. May 13, 2020. “Famous as this has been since its discovery, it has been willfully misread more often than not.  No mainstream scholar had any use for a reference to Hamlet years before it was supposed to have been written.”
• Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
• Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.