Some of the long succession of long-ish scatter-shot rebuttals by Dennis McCarthy, at the
Edward de Vere was Shakespeare Group, deserve to be answered piece by piece
as time comes available. McCarthy (advocate of Thomas North as the author of originals of the Shakespeare plays) responded first some two years ago to my observation upon his
“lack of knowledge of Tudor publishing and literature” by wittily
replying that my own observation that Tudor playwrights did not write their own book blurbs “exposes an ignorance of Tudor practices”. As usual, he uses such words as "irrefutable" by way of evidence.
In particular, he refers to the following:
This he describes as “[my] belief that authors never included long titles and subtitles... on their manuscripts”. In this way he tries to save his claim that Shakespeare/North can be shown to have written the title-page blurb to Arden of Faversham thus the play itself.
It is common knowledge, however, that playwrights sold their manuscripts to playing companies. Upon payment, the companies had total rights over the manuscript. They recopied it and often edited it. We have a modest number of surviving manuscripts (a very few in the original author's hand) and none of them exhibits subtitles of any sort.
As for the publisher composing brief, impactful descriptions for the title-pages of popular works to post around London as advertisements the record is clear. It is McKerrow who seems first to have made the general observation:
There are numerous allusions to the posting-up of titlepages in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, and we hear of the same practice in the time of Pope. It is perhaps in consequence of title-pages being regarded chiefly as advertisements, and as the business of the publisher rather than the author, that custom permitted them to vaunt so shamelessly the varied delights of the book within.1
The evidence is substantial, actually. We might start with Thomas Nashe's Terrors of the Night (1594)
...a number of you there bee, who consider neither premisses nor conclusion, but piteouslie torment Title Pages on everie post: never reading farther of anie Booke, than Imprinted by Simeon [the name of the printer] such a signe [“at the sign of such-and-such”], and yet with your dudgen judgements will desperatelie presume to run up to the hard hilts through the whole bulke of it.2
Being a pamphleteer, Nashe's works were “popular literature” thus subject to this mode of advertising. Published plays were popular and of a lower order still than pamphlets. They were also sold by the playing companies that had purchased them to the publisher. Not by the author. The author's manuscript had been left far behind.3
Next, perhaps, Bk V. Satire ii. Of Hall's Virgidemiarum (1597).
When Maevios first page of his poesie
Nayl'd to an hundreth postes for noveltie,
With his big title, an Italian mot,
Layes siege unto the backward buyers grote.4
By the late 1590s, at least, even poets had reason to fear that their title-pages might join the pamphleteers and playwrights. The serious poet was aghast at the possibility that his poems might be published and title-page plastered all over town (but especially St. Paul's Cathedral). The following should be examples enough. The authors and works are given in the endnotes.
What should I speake of infant-Rimers now,
That ply their Pen as Plow-men do their Plow:
And pester Posts, with Titles of new bookes;5
Whither thus hastes my little book so fast?
To Paul's Churchyard. What? in those cells to stand,
With one leaf like a rider's cloak put up
To catch a termer?6 or lie musty there
With rimes a term set out, or two, before?7
Nor have my title-leaf on posts or walls,
Or in cleft-sticks,
advanced to make calls
For termers, or some clerklike
serving-man,...8
IF you shall make Pauls Pillars Pennance do
In any sheet of mine, or set to view
The Title of this Book on any Post,
I wish your expectation may be lost;...9
Again, published plays were the lowest level of publication (excepting single sheet fliers and broadsides) for all that they could be quite popular. The author manuscripts were either discarded after making a clean copy or archived for making future such copies. The manuscripts provided to the publisher came from the player company scribes. What manuscripts have survived of published plays contain no title-page blurbs.
Mr. McCarthy does also point out the Thomas North's uncle, George, did write an autograph manuscript with a sub-title or description of modest length. While it doesn't address the specific issue here it does open the door to a number of fascinating facts around Edward de Vere as Shakespeare.
I have just presented the case, in my new study,10 that there is evidence that the pastoralist poet William Browne may have written some or most of the Act 4 masque in Shakespeare's The Tempest. His dedicated patron, William Herbert, the 3rd Earl of Pembroke almost certainly had a hand in the production, regardless. Many scholars think that Shakespeare wrote no more than a few lines of the masque.
Also in the same pastoralist group close around Pembroke, it turns out, was one William Basse, who was a familiar neighbor of the Baroness of Rycote, Bridget de Vere, at around the same time. Basse died in 1653 with a manuscript ready to go to press, entitled “The Pastorals and Other Works of William Basse.” He even drew a title page for it and copied an admirer's commendatory verse behind it. He had never published a book. It is a touching affair.
History remembers Basse for something else, though. He wrote the earliest surviving elegy we have upon the death of Shakespeare.
1McKerrow, Ronald. Printers' & Publishers' Devices in England & Scotland 1485—1640 (1913). xliv.
2Nashe, Thomas. The Works of Thomas Nashe (1905). 343. “Terrors of the Night”.
3This began to change with Ben Jonson after his 1616 folio.
4 Hall, Joseph. The Complete Poems Of Joseph Hall, D. D. (1879). 147. Virgidemiarum (1597). Bk V, Satire. ii.
5 Davies of Hereford, Complete Poems (1878). II.76. “Papers Complaint” (1610-11).
6 termer] a person who lived in London during the law terms. Essentially, an official with a country seat, servant, wife or child to the same, student, the equivalent of a snowbird.
7 Campion, Thomas. The Works of Dr. Thomas Campion (1889). 229 “The Writer to His Book”.
8 Jonson, Ben. The Works of Ben Jonson (1875). 149. “To my bookseller”
9 Eliot, Sir John. Poems or Epigrams, Satyrs, Elegies, Songs And Sonnets, Upon Several Persons And Occasions (1658). 11. “To the Stationer if need be.”
10 Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Shakespeare's The Tempest: a wedding masque for Susan de Vere (2024). https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CY5YYG1F/
Also at Virtual Grub Street:
- Rocco Bonetti's Blackfriars Fencing School and Lord Hunsdon's Water Pipe. August 12, 2023. “... the tenement late in the tenure of John Lyllie gentleman & nowe in the tenure of the said Rocho Bonetti...”
On Shakespeare's lameness and historical-fiction biography, etc. August 5, 2023. “Those who support Sogliardo of Stratford and other authorship candidates generally stop by from time to time to remark...”
- Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”
- Robert Greene and the Construction Shakespeare Never Used. August 9, 2022. 'Our first foray “staring intently into” the texts of Robert Greene has noted that his work utilized far fewer feminine endings than Shakespeare’s.'
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?”
- Check out the Shakespeare Authorship 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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