Shakespeare Authorship and Cumulative Evidence.

Cumulative Evidence: evidence of which the parts reinforce one another, producing an effect stronger than any part by itself. Dictionary.com.

Recently I have been reminded that Shakespeare's Hamlet is an enormously popular topic... and that the popular misconceptions about it are legion. On this occasion I've been treated to comment threads on my own Edward de Vere was Shakespeare Facebook group and another popular Facebook group called The Official William Shakespeare Page.

In the latter, the question proposed was “Why did he choose Elsinore to unfold the story of Hamlet?” Among a number of other errant comments on a range of vaguely related topics is the oft stated and always mistaken “fact” that “Shakespeare got the Hamlet story from a history by Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum (c. 1200).”

Actually, a gentleman by the name of Francois de Belleforest published a highly popular series of Italian novellas and other miscellaneous tales which he translated into French. I quote from my own Back When Ophelia Jumped Off a Cliff: the Hamlet of 1589.

63. The story upon which Shakespeare’s Hamlet is based is the first half of “Avec Quelle Ruse Amleth Qui Depuis fut Roy de Dannemarch, vengea la morte de son pere,”¹ &c. from the fifth book of Francois de Belleforest’s translation anthology series, Histoires Tragiques, published in 1581. Belleforest’s translation came from a late twelfth century Latin redaction by Saxo Grammaticus of a then popular Norse tale. Belleforest likely had his text from a 1514 edition published in Paris.²

There are a number of details in the French version and in the play that do not appear in Grammaticus. I am aware of none that appear in Grammaticus and the play but do not appear in the French version. Moreover, Shakespeare borrowed the plots of a number of his plays from the Histoires Tragiques.

Still, it is far-and-away more common to state that Grammaticus was Shakespeare's source.

As for the reference to Elsinore, it was the town beside which the royal castle of Kronborg was located. It was not mentioned in Grammaticus because it did not exist until centuries after his Gesta. It was not mentioned in Belleforest's translation because it was not mentioned in Grammaticus.

These facts might suggest the question: “Why, then, did Shakespeare's Hamlet refer to Elsinore when his source did not?” We will come to that in a moment.

In my own group, the old debate as to whether the pirates in Shakespeare's Hamlet point to Edward de Vere as the author of the play because he had himself been waylaid by pirates upon his return from Italy, through France, and across the channel in 1576.

I've pointed out in various venues that Shakespeare was in the habit of sticking closely to the details of the source from which he took the plot of his play. Where he deviates is where we find the references to the biography of Edward de Vere, as the rule. The character of Mercutio, in Romeo and Juliet, for example, does not appear in any French or Italian version of the tale. While he does appear in a poem taken from the tale attributed to a young member of the group of poets who ran with Edward de Vere in his youth he has only a cameo role as the butt of a joke.

Neither does the fact that Juliet's nurse ceased breast-feeding her eleven years before on the day of an earthquake in Verona. That is to say that Shakespeare's care to establish that Romeo's duel with Tybalt had occurred 11 years after the famous earthquake near Verona — the same year as Vere's infamous duel with Thomas Knevet, the uncle of Anne Vavasour (the model for Juliet) — is not in any version of the original tale.

In the Vere-Knevet duel, one of Vere's retainers was killed. In the Romeo-Tybalt duel Mercutio is killed. Vere's retainer had been a retainer for the Knevets, as well, at various times.³ In Romeo and Juliet Mercutio cries out:

A plague o' both your houses!
They have made worms' meat of me

Mercutio is not in the original story. Such tends to be the tip-off that we are about to view a moment borrowed from Vere's own life. It is not difficult to picture Vere as he heard his dying companion cry out exactly those words and Shakespeare as he memorialized them.

This pattern regularly repeats itself throughout the early and mid-career plays and even occasionally in the late plays. Another example from among the many repetitions is the pirate episode in Hamlet. As is the case with all of the of the vast number of occasions, the correspondence taken individually has only minimal evidentiary weight. But the overwhelming pattern of the instances taken together is powerful.

For our final quote, this from the Wikipedia page on the Shakespeare Authorship Question:

Anti-Stratfordians rely on what has been called a "rhetoric of accumulation", or what they designate as circumstantial evidence: similarities between the characters and events portrayed in the works and the biography of their preferred candidate; literary parallels with the known works of their candidate;... 

The “rhetoric of accumulation” here is a borrowed phrase from a work that has nothing to do with cumulative patterns of correspondence between texts and biographical events. But it sounds like a profound phrase so Stratfordians have redefined it to oppose cumulative evidence as illegitimate.

The Stratfordians work hard to give an aura of authority to user generated “encyclopedia” pages, such as these, declaring that these patterns (these mortal weaknesses for their candidate) are not legitimate forms of evidence. In traditional forms of rational deduction the larger the number of correspondences between two entities the higher, by orders of magnitude, the likelihood that they are related. But not in Stratford.

Oh well, it is by no means the only evidence for Vere. But it is our present subject. And, in particular, there is the question as to why Shakespeare mentions Elsinore when it was not mentioned in his source.

One possibility is that he saw the castle during the weeks he escaped to Flanders without royal permission in 1574. Another possibility is that he heard of castle from his brother-in-law, Peregrine Bertie, who traveled to the castle once in 1582 and again in 1585 on diplomatic missions lasting several months each. Another possibility is that he saw it when the Earl of Leicester had been sent across the channel to Flanders to lead the Protestant effort to fend off the Spanish Catholics. This time I quote from my own Edward de Vere was Shakespeare: at long last the proof.

161. Perhaps because there were few experienced military leaders still alive, in long peaceful England, Oxford was appointed General of the Horse. Just as inexplicably as he was appointed, he was called back. Generals paid the expenses of their commands, as the rule. No longer a wealthy man, it is possible that he proved unable to meet the obligation.⁴

There would seem to be no documentary evidence as to his travels while he was there. Or maybe it is more likely that he heard of Elsinore another way:

167. On June 17, 1586, the players Will Kempe, George Bryan and Thomas Pope, set sail from England as servants of the Danish ambassador, Henrik Ramel, to Elsinore, in Denmark, where they entertained King Frederick II. In September of that year, the Danish and German authorities gave them permission to try their luck in Germany. The three men, and a young tumbler, were listed as musicians and such was their main act. They do not seem to be the first players to go to Denmark, or on to Germany, as a record exists of an English company in Elsinore in 1585, in which no names are given.⁵

Each of these names is specifically cited in the First Folio as being among the foremost of those who acted in Shakespeare's plays. While Shakspere would also have known the actors, the parallels between the Stratford man's life and the works of Shakespeare are few and far between so they qualify less as evidence.

What might be a better question, however, is “Why of the four versions we have of Hamlet do only the last two mention Elsinore?” Neither the version of which we have only the German translation nor the first quarto English version mentions the name of the castle in which the events take place. It is only an unnamed royal castle in Denmark.

As for the pirates in Hamlet, put them together with the vast number of other correspondences between Edward de Vere's biography and the works of Shakespeare and they most definitely do qualify as evidence. But not all such correspondences will prove out in the mythological “final tally”. Just most of them.

1 With What Cunning Amleth Who Since Was King of Denmark, Avenged the Death of His Father.

2Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Back When Ophelia Jumped Off a Cliff: the Hamlet of 1589 (2022). 63.

3 Nicholas, Harris. Memoirs of the Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton (1847). 321-2. There are several extant accounts all of them partial. In this one, Baron Burghley refers to the man who was killed as “Mr. Knyvet's man, called Long Tom, that once served and was maintained by my Lord of Oxford”. But there seems to have been only one death and Knyvet was pardoned by the queen to prevent his having to stand trial for the death.

4 Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Edward de Vere was Shakespeare: at long last the proof (2013, 2017). 161.

5 Ibid. 167.

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 (Almost) 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.