On such occasions, however, the Stratford myth generally forced auxiliary conclusions upon the scholar as insupportable as their main conclusions were insightful. Those main findings might provoke popular debate on the particular matter at hand. They might be considered brilliant until the failure to fit them successfully into the Sogliardo of Stratford narrative consigned them to the dusty stacks in library basements where subsequent generations were unlikely to encounter them.
One fine example of this and more is Richard Garnett's 'The Date and Occasion of "The Tempest",' which first appeared in The Universal Review. Volume 3, Issue 12 (April 1889) 556-566. For my references here, I provide page numbers, in brackets, from the reprint in Mr. Garnett's Essays of an Ex-Librarian (1901).
Richard Garnett's brief article was not the first to declare the fourth act of Shakepseare's The Tempest to be a masque. Rather it was the first to argue that the play was expressly written to be presented as part of the festivities surrounding the marriage of the Princess Elzabeth, daughter to King James I, to the Count Palantine, in 1613.
The act is a hymeneal masque such as was popular during the reign of James. Several were expressly written for the 1613 celebrations (including one each by George Chapman and Thomas Campion). A loose page from the Revels records, discovered among the manuscript papers of George Vertue, expressly states that The Tempest was played.
It appears from the manuscript of Vertue that 'The Tempest' was acted by John Heminge and the rest of the King's company before Prince Charles, the Lady Elizabeth, and the Prince Palatine Elector, at the beginning of the year 1613. Frederick had come over to receive his bride, the Princess, who was the darling of all Protestant hearts. Ferdinand, then, was Frederick, and Miranda, Elizabeth." [31]
Regardless that the provenance was highly questionable, the scholarly world tended to accept the pages as legitimate.
Garnett, then, entered the lists as champion of the 1613 date. As is so often the case, he covered the fundamental weakness of his case with an ipse dixit assertion.
We have, on the contrary, no right to assume the existence of the piece before the first notice we have of its representation, which, as already stated, took place at the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine. [34]
Lacking evidence that The Tempest hadn't been written before and revived, he simply declared that there was “no right” to assume such a thing.
Garnett did realize that his personal assurance as to the date of composition was not enough and he expanded upon his reasons. It is here that the crux of the matter lies though he could not have known as much.
It is not credible that so many marks of a play intended for Court representation — brevity, unity of time and place, a brilliant spectacle apparently unconnected with the plot, and to which nevertheless everything is made to lead up — should combine in a mere revival of a play written for the ordinary stage. Much less can the piece be a revival of one which had already done duty as a hymeneal drama, for Shakespeare never produced anything unfitting the occasion; and it is safe to affirm that before the espousals of Frederick and Elizabeth no marriage had taken place in his time to which "The Tempest" could be in the least degree appropriate. Everything bespeaks a royal marriage, and everything corresponds with the royal marriage of 1613. [39]
The itallics are very much my own. His Shakespeare being so unquestionably Sogliardo of Stratford, Garnett did not even realize his unfounded assumption. Surely, there could not possibly be a prior Court wedding for which he had motive to write the masque.
As strange as so much of traditional Shakespeare scholarship can be, in order to keep the Stratford man, this is among the stranger. There are actually a number of reasons that Vertue's highly suspicious manuscript page is likely to state a genuine fact, that the play had been performed in 1613 as suggested. But neither Garett nor the others in the field was aware of those reasons. They have to do with signs of revision that they both categorically dismissed as a possibility.
Starting, then, from this overview, Garett went on to inadvertantly present powerful evidence that the play could not have been written expressly for the 1613 festivities.
If Frederick and Elizabeth are Ferdinand and Miranda, it follows, as long ago pointed out by Tieck, that Prospero is James. [43]
The claim was met in the Shakespeare scholarship community with utter disbelief. So now, Garett was first right for all the wrong reasons and now wrong for all the right ones. Prospero was indeed the father of the bride in the wedding originally being celebrated. But Frederick and Elizabeth were not Ferdinand and Miranda in the wedding for which the masque was written.
Prospero had been properly identified for centuries as representing Shakespeare himself. The implications of the fact being impossible in the Sogliardo narrative, however, further scholarly debate stopped at the edge of an abyss. The matter was left unresolved.
Prospero was indeed a representation of Shakespeare himself. Miranda, then, represented a daughter of Shakespeare. A daughter whose wedding, by all appearances, was held at Court and followed with a grand Hymeneal masque. The matter was resolved by making Prospero Shakespeare and the rest of the play a fiction bearing no relationship to any actual historical facts — much less facts at the Court of James I where a grand wedding could hardly have been hidden.
Nevertheless, King James was hidden in plain sight in the play. At the original showing he was represented by Alonso, the king of Naples. His party had barely survived the always treacherous seas of a transition of monarchies. Through his magic, Prospero had brought them to his island where they would set right the injustice of his exile.
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
- More on Thomas North as Shakespeare and author of Arden of Feversham. June 14, 2021. “This is also the reason why the title pages included the address of the shop that was selling the book.”
- 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?”
- Gutenberg, proto-Hack Writers and Shakespeare. May 26, 2020. “A less well known effect of the Reformation was that many young Catholic men who had taken religious orders in order to receive an education began to lead lives at large from monastic discipline. Like Erasmus and Rabelais they took up the pen.”
- 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.
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