Virtual Grub Street: 2021 SAT Conference: On The Presentations of Eddi Jolly and Earl Showerman.

It was pleasant to hear so much from Eddi Jolly, in her presentation for the recent Shakespeare Authorship Trust conference, about going through the first two quartos of Hamlet with a fine tooth comb, and Belleforest’s Amleth with dictionaries of pre-modern French by her side. I recognize a fellow traveler.

Grappling with primary source material is essential. Because she has done so I am able to add a couple more striking correspondences between the first quarto and Amleth. These I can add to the other types of compelling evidence, in the texts themselves, that the first quarto is actually an earlier version of the play written when plays were considerably shorter. I myself have leaked out the importance of the character named Montano who in later versions of the play became Reynaldo.[1] There is a great deal more.

She also reminded me, by way of off-hand comment about the Latin text, to go in search of more quality critical work on Saxo Grammaticus’ Latin version of the tale. Through the wonder of internet libraries, I have now downloaded Muller’s annotated 1839 edition.[2] I’ve yet to see any reason to assert that Shakespeare read the Saxo Latin version but it’s essential to look at greater length.

I agree with many of the influences Jolly detects from the French version. Where I might disagree I can only do so with the utmost respect given her close attention to the primary sources. That Shakespeare likely found the seed of the idea of including a ghost from the French tale will meet with no argument from me. That the character of the ghost is thoroughly taken from the ghost in Seneca’s Agamemnon, however, can hardly be disputed.

Furthermore, for all that early translations from Seneca’s plays were highly popular, I find from my research that the ghost was decidedly taken from the original Latin.

While the plot of Shakespeare’s play is drawn from Belleforest’s Ameleth, much of the tone and many of the additional scenes not in Belleforest are adapted from the Agamemnon.[3]

I leave a link my findings in this particular in the footnote below.

In his own presentation Earl Showerman, the highly personable titular expert in Shakespeare’s classical knowledge, reminds us that he himself has little Latin and less Greek, regardless of evidence regarding Shakespeare in that matter. By way of authority he presents a raft of book titles of high-end secondary source material. He is well served. They form quite a phalanx.

But they are not uniformly confident that Shakespeare read the Aeschalean originals from which Seneca drew. Mr. Showerman’s confidence that the Bard read at length from classical Greek texts surely needs more precise evidence. We are agreed that he had some facility with the language. My own essay “Shake-speare’s Greek”[4] makes clear, I submit, that he had to have done the translations of sonnets 153 and 154 from the original Greek of Marianus. My variorum edition of Edward de Vere’s Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584)[5] cites the same fine work by J. Churton Collins, cited in Showerman’s informative “Shakespeare’s Greater Greek: Macbeth and Aeschylus’ Oresteia”[6]

That variorum, however, also goes into considerable depth to trace how Ulysses and Agamemnon — traditionally known as the “Camp Section” of the later Troilus and Cresida — is actually taken almost entirely from Dictys Cretensis’ Ephemeris Belli Troiani version of the Troy story. Little more than the character Thersites is taken from Homer’s Greek.

The play of Troilus and Cressida was not taken from classical Greek as Mr. Showerman avers. The play gets its reputation as an eccentric redaction of the Homeric tale because the Ephemeris tradition was written to de-mythologize the pagan tradition of the Greek heroes. And while there is suspected to have been a Byzantine Greek original only Latin transcriptions of it have survived. Those Latin versions were sufficiently popular that they bred translations and versions in all major European vulgar languages, one of which, in French, was well-known by Shakespeare.

As for Showerman’s point that Edward de Vere would have daily read the bible in Greek as a student in William Cecil’s famous school, I cannot see how the fact does his theories any benefit. Greek texts of the New Testament were all written in koine Greek — most of it moreover of mediocre quality at best. The Greek Old Testament of the Septuagint, while much better written, still is koine, and highly idiomatic with hebraicized constructions. Koine, in either case, is quite a different animal from classical Greek.

Again, Mr. Showerman’s engaging presentation reminded me that I also need to check the internet’s digital libraries for more high-end bi-lingual and critical editions of the Aeschylus and Euripides. Like Eddi Jolly, a library of classical Greek dictionaries at my elbow, and an endless supply of persistence, further conclusions just might prove possible.

[1] Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “Shakepeare’s Character Names: Shylock, Ophelia, etc.” Virtual Grub Street, July 13, 2021. https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2021/07/shakespeares-character-names-shylock.html

[2] Saxonis Grammatici Historia Danica . Recensuit et Commentariis Illustravit (1839). [Muller ed.] https://books.google.com/books/about/Saxonis_Grammatici_Historia_Danica.html?id=O9hBAAAAYAAJ

[3] Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “Shakespeare’s Funeral Meats..”. Virtual Grub Street, https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2020/05/shakespeares-funeral-meats_13.html

[4] Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. “Shake-speare’s Greek” Virtual Grub Street, May 08, 2014. https://gilbertwesleypurdy.blogspot.com/2014/05/shake-speares-greek.html

[5] Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584) (The Early Plays of Edward de Vere (William Shakespeare) Book 1) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JD7KM1T

[6] Showerman, Earl. “Shakespeare’s Greater Greek: Macbeth and Aeschylus’ Oresteia” Brief Chronicles, Vol 3 (2011). Citing J. Churton Collins, Studies in Shakespeare (Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., 1904).