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Sunday, March 03, 2024

North Authorship Theory in Context: The Exchequer and Stage Directions.

North Authorship Theory in Context Series:


It is too easy to go in search of confirmation of an historical theory with a 21st century eye and to find what one seeks. To find some matching words in a search engine result indicates genuine possibilities but will likely be misinterpreted as mathematical certainties should it fill a need. After all, 2+2=4 in Tudor times just as it does now.

Using a search engine requires at least as much specialized knowledge as operating an automobile. Each time and place in history is a landscape that rewrites most of the driver's manual. Use the standard manual and you will not even know that you have gone wrong. Tudor accountants, for just one tiny example, added their 2+2 at an exchequer. The reason an exchequer was called an “exchequer” is because its 2+2 was added by moving tokens on a segmented board. Used to play chess or perform mathematical calculations, the board was called an (ex)chequer board (L. scaccarium).

When kings and noblemen began keeping track of their treasuries and records of their transactions the western world had yet to adopt the Arabic number system (particularly the placeholder “0”). If you read 2+2 in Medieval and Tudor texts they actually say “II et II sunt IV”. By the mid-16th century +, - and = signs did exist but only (or almost only) Moslems, Italians and child geeks under 13 knew how to use them or the Arabic base-10 number system with its mind-bending “0”.

You can imagine, then, the challenge of subtracting CCXLI from DCCCXC. The monarch's best hope was to hire a bunch of (ac)count(ants) to move tokens on a(n ex)checker board, scribes to write down the results and notch them into wooden receipts, clerks to enter the amounts on the slips of paper onto long scrolls, supervisors to assure the flurry of notes remained properly coordinated and Barons of the Exchequer to protect the scrolls and process, and to order severe punishment for miscreants. The operation required surgical precision because there was absolutely no way to check one's work except to do the whole thing over again.

Arch North theorist, Dennis McCarthy, has not declared any findings regarding the Royal Exchequer that I am aware of. He does declare that a stage-direction for one of the pageants inserted into Shakespeare's Life of Henry VIII is taken from a private travel journal kept by Thomas North in 1555. This based upon the fact that

searches of both EEBO and the many trillions of webpages on Google confirm that North’s entry and Shakespeare’s play are the only two known passages that place after them within 30 words of next them with.

This is, indeed, the result one gets for the Google entry '"After them" AROUND(30) "next them with"'. But this hardly tells the story.

First of all, the second phrase/construction is not properly “next them with”. It is “next them” followed by a comma indicating a new clause follows beginning with the word “with”. Search on '"After them" AROUND(30) "next them" and one seems at first to get much the same result. North uses the construction in a passage in the travel journal describing a Papal Consistory and the same construction appears in Henry VIII.

If we want to understand something of what we may have discovered, we might search on close variations such as 'Shakespeare “next them”'. That it appears once in Henry VIII, is hardly as shocking a discovery as the fact that it is the only time it would seem to have appeared in all the works published under the name of Shakespeare.

So then, “next them” is only used this once in all of “Shakespeare,” in a play that is admittedly co-written, and only in an extensive stage-direction such as playwrights did not as the rule supply but rather the stage manager and company scribe.

McCarthy does also acknowledge that Henry VIII was co-written by John Fletcher — a fact that I have pointed out elsewhere causes the North theory no end of problems. If one enters 'John Fletcher “next them”' into the Google Search Engine one discovers that Fletcher used the construction a mere three times throughout all of his plays. Two of the instances, interestingly, are also in the text of a single extensive stage-direction for a pageant scene such as playwrights did not supply, as the rule, but rather the stage manager and/or company scribe.

Also interesting, both of the plays were likely acted at the Globe theater around 1613 (Fletcher having become the company's main playwright a few years before). The same stage-manager and/or scribe quite possibly composed the stage-directions for the pageant scenes in both plays. That being the case, '"After them" AROUND(30) "next them"' would simply be a coincidence between two very common word-pairs thus not a particularly significant one.

It will be helpful, at this point, to consider these stage-directions themselves. First from Henry VIII, II.iv.:


Trumpets, Sennet , and Cornets.

Enter two Vergers, with short silver wands; next them two Scribes in the habite of Doctors; after them, the Bishop of Canterbury alone; after him, the Bishops of Lincolne, Ely, Rochester, and S. Asaph: Next them, with some small distance, followes a Gentleman bearing the Purse, with the great Seale, and a Cardinals Hat: Then two Priests, bearing each a Silver Crosse: Then a Gentleman Usher bare-headed, accompanyed with a Sergeant at Armes, bearing a Silver Mace: Then two Gentlemen bearing two great Silver Pillers: Afier them, side by side, the two Cardinals, two Noblemen , with the Sword and Mace. The King takes place under the Cloth of State. The two Cardinalls sit under him as Judges. The Queene takes place some distance from the King. The Bishops place themselves on each side the Court in manner of a Consistory: Below them the Scribes . The Lords sit next the Bishops. The rest of the Attendants stand in convenient order about the Stage.

Next, from the opening pageant of The Triumph of Death, from Four Plays or Moral Representations in One, one of the two triumphs attributed to John Fletcher alone.

The TRIUMPH.

Enter Musicians: next them, Perolot with the wound he diedwith. Then Gabriella and Maria, with their wounds: after them, four Furies with Bannerets in[s]crib'd Revenge, Murder, Lust and Drunkenness, singing. Next them, Lavall wounded. Then Chariot with Death drawn by the Destinies.

Neither of the playwrights is likely to have used the construction any more than they are likely to have directed what props and furniture were to be brought out of storage for the production or where the musicians would play what specific musical instruments in the fanfare.

It will be interesting to look into this resemblance further but I do not offer it alone by way of rebuttal. It is only one small piece of a much bigger picture. For the next tranche of information, I present parallel columns, after Mr. McCarthy's manner, though with a few more colors, showing a more probable relationship of the stage-direction for Henry VIII to George Cavendish's Life of Cardinal Wolsey.


Next: A Different Set of Parallel Columns.


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