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Monday, June 27, 2022

Mr. Prechter’s Accidents.

According to Mr. Robert Prechter’s theory, presented in the Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable video presentation “George Peele, His Only Surviving Letter, and its Connection to the Earl of Oxford and Shakespeare[1], the reputed Tudor author George Peele existed but his literary production actually came from Edward de Vere. In a word, Peele is an allonym for De Vere.

Peele mentions at least one daughter but probably three in a letter central to Prechter’s theory while no official records concerning his family and life apart from literary activities have survived. De Vere being a nobleman, we have many more official records about his life including that he had three daughters alive at the time of the letter. By the non-sequitur that documented daughters vs. un-documented daughters establishes a probability that the person with documented daughters wrote a letter mentioning daughters he finds evidence that De Vere wrote the letter under the name George Peele. The same class of logical non-sequitur is applied to an illness mentioned in the letter.

Another Peele signature exists on a receipt for the production of a play acted at Oxford before Albertus de Lasco, Palatine of Siradia, in Poland, in 1583. The play was entitled Dido. The play is attributed to William Gager. Some suggest that Peele probably also contributed. According to Prechter “Shakespeare recalls this very production” in the player’s speech of Aeneas’s tale to Dido in Hamlet having signed himself as Peele on the receipt for payment for the 1583 play.

Mr. Prechter further detects a pattern of similar language between the letter, the accompanying manuscript poem and the works of Shakespeare/Vere. In 1 Henry VI, and throughout the canon, he finds Shakespeare using the word accident to mean “incident” just like George Peele. But Shakespeare is thought only to have written a very small portion of that play, if any at all, and not the portion with the usage he highlights. Among the leading candidates for the other portions of the play is Peele.

For all that centuries of scholars have asserted a detectable difference in the styles and vocabulary of Shakespeare and Peele such that their styles can be distinguished in anonymous plays and their portions of plays of collective authorship, Prechter finds them identical. Their handwriting he also finds identical based upon the letter and the manuscript poem by Peele.

Far more to the point,  however, is the demonstrable fact that all native English writers of Tudor times used accident as we use the word incident. Christopher Marlowe was neither Edward de Vere nor George Peele when he wrote in the epigram “In Gerontem. XX.”

Accounts the time of every odd event,

Not from Christ's birth, nor from the prince's reign,

But from some other famous accident,

Which in men's general notice doth remain,—

The siege of Boulogne, and the plaguy sweat,

The going to Saint Quintin's and New-Haven,

The rising in the north, the frost so great,…[2]

And while Marlowe also demonstrably influenced the works of both Shakespeare and Peele, his usage of the word accident played no part in that influence. It was simply the most common usage.

I must now try my luck — not being aware of precisely how many Tudor writers are presently advanced,  by various persons and their theories, as being a front for Shakespeare and/or Vere — and give several more examples, among dozens harvested in less than a half-hour, from other hopefully unchallenged writers.

The first we have from Gabriel Harvey’s personal letter book covering from 1573 to 1580. It has been my impression that the earlier in the century the more accident meant incident.

besides daylye freshe newes and a thousande both ordinary and extraordinary occurrents and accidents in the worlde we ar[e] yet (notwithstanding all and singular the premises) to take instructions[3]

Even then, however, the word had a common range of meaning. Elsewhere in Harvey, and the other authors we will mention, various shadings of the meaning are used. This pattern continues at least into the second half of the 17th century.

In William Painter’s highly popular Palace of Pleasure (1566, 1575), for example, we repeatedly find the most common usage.

THE THIRTY-SIXTH NOUELL.

Andreuccio of Perugia being come to Naples to buy horses, was in one night surprised, with three marueilous accidentes.[4]

But Painter also shares another common usage, from time to time, explicitly  connecting accidents to fortune.

Fortune prepared a new accident[5]

This to say that accidents are the unexpected results of Fortune. Not only negative results but positive, as well, as is evident throughout Tudor literature including Shakespeare in The Tempest.

By accident most strange, bountiful Fortune,

Now my dear lady, hath mine enemies

Brought to this shore;[6]

They need only be unexpected. In this way they are slightly modified from the accidents in the previous examples. Fortune, it may be recalled, is a constant theme with Shakespeare but William Painter was not an allonym of Edward de Vere.

In Thomas Middleton’s The Spanish Gipsy, first played sometime in the 1620s, we still have the full old fashioned accident = incident usage.

Fernando. A strange mischance: but what I have, my lord

Francisco, this day noted, I may tell you

An accident of merriment and wonder.[7]

Being a public play, the audience is expected to understand perfectly what has been said because it is the way that all use the word in their daily lives. George Peele sharing his usage for accident with Shakespeare, then, is actually George Peele and Shakespeare both sharing the usage with all of Tudor England.

As for the 1583 play Dido, attributed to William Gager, in which Mr. Prechter finds the origin of the player’s speech in Hamlet his theory is once again incorrect. John Stowe described a popular detail of the performance of Dido in his continuation of Holinshed’s 1587 chronicle.

at the setting out of a verie statelie tragedie named Dido, wherein the quéenes banket (with Eneas narration of the destruction of Troie) was liuelie described in a marchpaine patterne[8]

Not wanting to add a downer to the festivities celebrating Lasco’s visit, Aeneas’s tragic tale was not spoken but rather represented in a giant marzipan served to the audience. The lack of any such speech in the play  — written and acted in Latin — can be verified at The Philological Museum site.[9] An English translation is also provided. Gager's speech, it turns out, was not "caviar," but, rather, "marzipan to the general".

By way of disclaimer, my conjecture that connections between Vere’s 1584 Ulysses and Agamemnon and Hamlet show that the player’s speech likely came from the former is explained at some length in my Variorum Edition Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584) (The Early Plays of Edward de Vere, Book 1).[10] I, too, have wondered, however, whether the very first version of Hamlet might not have been among the many unnamed plays said to have been performed in order to celebrate Lasco’s visit, he having been a Polish nobleman.

 



[1] “George Peele, His Only Surviving Letter, and its Connection to the Earl of Oxford and Shakespeare.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5oOp2GXVJw

[2] Bullen, A. H. The Works of Marlowe, III.224.

[3] Scott, Edward John Long. Letter Book of Gabriel Harvey, A.D. 1573-1580. (1884), 80.

[4] Painter, William. Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1575, 1890), I.143.

[5] Painter, III.136.

[6] Shakespeare. The Tempest, I.ii.209

[7] Dyce, Alexander. The Works of Thomas Middleton (1840). “The Spanish Gipsy” IV.153.

[8] Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587). 1355. The Holinshed Project. Oxford University. http://english.nsms.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/texts.php?text1=1587_9134

[10] Shakespeare. Ulysses and Agamemnon (1584). https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JD7KM1T


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1 comment:

Richard Malim said...

The reference to Gager's Dido is interesting. He wrote in Latin and Puttenham in Arte of English Poesy 1589 used his own translation by memory to illustrate figures in the Book . He uses precisely the same method on Shakespeare's Plays without crediting them, but thus proving that theyb were written prior to 1589. See my book Ch 9.